Packet cloaking: Protecting receiver privacy against traffic analysis

Abstract

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 1/k. 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.