Using Parasite Flows to Camouflage Flow Traffic

This paper presents a flow based architecture for network traffic camouflaging. We aim at hiding both the message traffic pattern and the fact that camouflaging itself is taking place, while at the same time guaranteeing the QoS requirement of the message flow. The idea is to embed the packets of the message flow into the packets of another flow, denoted as carrier flow, which in turn may be generated by a well known network service. We say that message flows act as parasites while the carrier flows are the hosts. We study issues in selecting the carrier to improve the system’s performance while satisfying both security and QoS requirements. A flow-based traffic camouflaging prototype system has been realized. The experimental evaluation shows that the use of parasite flows effectively hide both the message traffic pattern and the fact that camouflaging is taking place.