Power-Aware Traffic Cover Mode to Prevent Traffic Analysis in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks
Shu Jiang, Nitin H. Vaidya, Wei Zhao · 2000
Abstract — Traffic analysis poses a serious threat to communication se-curity, 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 im-portant to minimize dummy traffic while achieving the desired security ob-jective. 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 im-plementing the cover mode, and evaluate the impact of these techniques on system lifetime and on energy consumption per unit of real traffic transmit-ted in the network.