Obfuscation of critical infrastructure network traffic using fake communication

Abstract

The tendency in cyber attacks has evolved from ones immediately causing abnormal operations to advanced attacks after information extraction by traffic sniffing. In particular, the unchanging characteristics of CIS networks are more susceptible to advanced attacks through information extraction. In this paper, we suggest the concept of an obfuscation method for CIS network traffic to interfere with information extraction. We investigated the characteristics of CIS traffic as found from real data. Based on our observations, we propose a method of creating fake communication to make the best use of surplus network bandwidth. We show that our method can vary the characteristics of a CIS network to prevent information extraction by sniffing.