A Comprehensive Analysis of Interval Based Network Flow Watermarking

摘要

As the main active traffic analysis method, network flow watermarking (NFW) has been proven effective for flow correlation in anonymous communication system or stepping stone detection. In various types of network flow watermarking schemes, the interval-based ones can achieve significant better capability of resisting network interference. However, there still exists no work to give a comprehensive analysis of them, specifically on practicability as the implementation of NFW in Internet still remains a great challenge. In this paper, the existing interval-based NFW schemes are comparatively analyzed by benchmarking their performance on robustness, invisibility and practicability. Different from some prior work, we pay special attention to the practicability evaluation, which is related to time and storage overhead, communication and computation overhead, and the statistical model demand. Experimental results on CAIDA dataset give an overview of the existing interval-based NFW schemes.