On Flow Marking Attacks in Wireless Anonymous Communication Networks

— This paper studies the degradation of anonymity in a flow-based wireless mix network under flow marking attacks, in which an adversary embeds a recognizable pattern of marks into wireless traffic flows by electromagnetic interference. We find that traditional mix technologies are not effective in defeating flow marking attacks, and it may take an adversary only a few seconds to recognize the communication relationship between hosts by tracking such intentional marks. Flow marking attacks utilize frequency domain analytical techniques and convert time domain marks into invariant feature frequencies. To counter flow marking attacks, we propose a new class of countermeasure based on digital filtering technology and show that this filter-based countermeasure can effectively defend a wireless mix network from flow marking attacks.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: ICDCS
• Authors: Xinwen Fu, Ye Zhu, Bryan Graham, Riccardo Bettati, Wei Zhao
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, Flow Marking Attacks, ICDCS 2005, Wireless Mix Network, flow Marking Attacks