학술논문

Novel and Practical SDN-based Traceback Technique for Malicious Traffic over Anonymous Networks
Document Type
Conference
Source
IEEE INFOCOM 2019 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications Computer Communications (INFOCOM), 2019 IEEE Conference on. :1180-1188 Apr, 2019
Subject
Communication, Networking and Broadcast Technologies
Servers
Switches
Relays
IP networks
Communication networks
Anonymous communication systems
traceback technique
software-defined network
Language
ISSN
2641-9874
Abstract
Diverse anonymous communication systems are widely deployed as they can provide the online privacy protection and Internet anti-censorship service. However, these systems are severely abused and a large amount of anonymous traffic is malicious. To mitigate this issue, we propose a novel and practical traceback technique to confirm the communication relationship between the suspicious server and the user. We leverage the software-defined network (SDN) switch at a destination server side to intercept target traffic towards the server and alter the advertised TCP window sizes so as to stealthily vary the traffic rate at the server. By carefully varying the traffic rate, we can successfully modulate a secret signal into the traffic. The traffic carrying the signal passes through the anonymous communication system and reaches the SDN switch at the user side. Then we can detect the modulated signal from the traffic so as to confirm the communication relationship between the server and the user. To validate the feasibility and effectiveness of our technique, extensive real-world experiments are performed using three popular anonymous communication systems, i.e., SSH tunnel, OpenVPN tunnel, and Tor. The results demonstrate that the detection rates approach 100% for SSH and Open VPN and 95% for Tor while the false positive rates are significantly low, approaching 0% for these three systems.