Abstract

Traffic analysis poses a serious threat to communication security, especially in wireless networks. Encryption may be used to hide message contents, whereas traffic padding may be used to hide the traffic pattern. This paper deals with the issue of preventing traffic analysis by inserting dummy (or padding) traffic to hide the real traffic pattern. The observable traffic pattern, after dummy traffic has been inserted, is referred to as a cover mode. Since the dummy traffic incurs an overhead, it is important to minimize dummy traffic while achieving the desired security objective. In this paper, we attempt to develop a suitable cover mode with the objective of minimizing energy consumption -- the nodes in wireless ad hoc networks typically have limited battery supply, therefore, it is important to minimize the energy consumption. We propose different methods for implementing the cover mode, and evaluate the impact of these techniques on system lifetime and on energy consumption per unit of real traffic transmitted in the network.

Citations