Traffic flow confidentiality in IPsec: Protocol and implementation

Abstract

Traffic Flow Confidentiality (TFC) mechanisms are techniques devised to hide/masquerade the traffic pattern to prevent statistical traffic analysis attacks. Their inclusion in widespread security protocols, in conjunction with the ability for deployers to flexibly control their operation, might boost their adoption and improve privacy of future networks. This paper describes a TFC protocol integrated, as a security protocol, in the IPsec security architecture. A Linux-based implementation has been developed, supporting a variety of perpacket treatments (padding, fragmentation, dummy packet generation, and artificial alteration of the packet forwarding delay), in an easily combinable manner. Experimental results are reported to demonstrate the flexibility and the effectiveness of the TFC implementation. © 2008 International Federation for Information Processing.