Counting Packets Sent Between Arbitrary Internet Hosts
Jeffrey Knockel, Jedidiah R. Crandall · 2014
In this paper we demonstrate a side-channel technique to infer whether two machines are exchanging packets on the Internet provided that one of them is a Linux ma-chine. For ICMP and UDP exchanges, we require that at least one machine is a Linux machine, and for TCP connections, we require that at least the server is a Linux machine. Unlike many side-channel measurement tech-niques, our method does not require that either machine be idle. That is, we make no assumptions about either machines ’ traffic patterns with respect to other hosts on the Internet. We have implemented our technique, and we present the results of a proof-of-concept experiment showing that it can effectively measure whether hosts are communicating. 1