Browsing by Author "Lunnamo, Sami Petteri"

Traditionally, traffic analysis is something that has been used to measure and keep track of a network's situation regarding network congestion, networking hardware failures, etc. However, largely due to commercial interests such as targeted advertisement, traffic analysis techniques can also be used to identify and track a single user's movements within the Internet. To counteract this perceived breach of privacy and anonymity, several counters have been developed over time, e.g. proxies used to obfuscate the true source of traffic, making it harder for others to pinpoint your location. Another approach has been the development of so called anonymous overlay networks, application-level virtual networks running on top of the physical IP network. The core concept is that by the way of encryption and obfuscation of traffic patterns, the users of such anonymous networks will gain anonymity and protection against traffic analysis techniques. In this master's thesis we will be taking a look at how message forwarding or packet routing in IP networks functions and how this is exploited in different analysis techniques to single out a visitor to a website or just someone with a message being forwarded through a network device used for traffic analysis. After that we will discuss some examples of anonymous overlay networks and see how well they protect their users from traffic analysis, and how do their respective models hold up against traffic analysis attacks from a malicious entity. Finally, we will present a case study about Tor network's popularity by running a Tor relay node and gathering information on how much data the relay transmits and from where does the traffic originate. CCS-concepts: - Security and privacy ~ Privacy protections - Networks ~ Overlay and other logical network structures - Information systems ~ Traffic analysis