Packet Cloaking: Protecting Receiver Privacy Against Traffic Analysis

With widespread use of the Internet, there is an increase in concern over users´ privacy. In particular, an adversary may identify the receiver involved in a communication session by observing the packet traffic. We propose a new routing mechanism, which we call packet cloaking, to protect the privacy of a receiver. The main idea of packet cloaking is to transmit multiple copies of a sent packet to a selected group of k receivers, so that an adversary may only identify the true receiver with a probability of j. We present the system design to support packet cloaking. We also propose two metrics that measure the receiver privacy, based on evaluating the similarity between the sender/receiver traffic patterns. We have performed experimental evaluations to verify the effectiveness of our approach.