Privacy Enhancing Network Gateway Path Obfuscation
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing secure communication systems, such as VPNs and The Onion Router (TOR), are inadequate in obscuring the identities of communicating parties and are not scalable, making them vulnerable to traffic flow analysis attacks and costly to deploy and manage.
Innovation Solution
A Privacy Enhanced Network (PEN) that uses a controller to compute unique, random flow paths through a network of gateways for each data flow, obscuring source and destination addresses and ports, and employing a policy database to manage traffic flows, thereby increasing obfuscation and scalability while minimizing infrastructure changes and operational costs.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If traditional secure communication systems (VPN, TOR) are used, then privacy protection is provided, but the systems are vulnerable to traffic flow analysis attacks and not scalable
Solution Approach 1:
The system segments the network into multiple gateway nodes that independently handle different portions of traffic flows. Each gateway processes and forwards traffic through computed paths, dividing the overall privacy protection function across multiple independent units. This segmentation enables scalability as new gateways can be added to the network without requiring system-wide reconfiguration.
Solution Approach 2:
The controller acts as an intermediary that computes optimal paths between source and destination gateways without directly handling the data traffic itself. This intermediary architecture separates control plane functions from data plane functions, allowing the system to scale by adding more gateway nodes while the controller manages path computation for all traffic flows.
2Reliability
If unique random flow paths are computed for each data flow, then obfuscation effectiveness is increased, but system complexity and computational overhead increase
Solution Approach 1:
The controller pre-computes and caches flow paths between gateway pairs before traffic actually needs to be routed. When traffic flows need to be routed, the system retrieves pre-computed paths from the cache rather than performing complex path optimization in real-time. This preliminary action reduces computational overhead during traffic routing while maintaining the effectiveness of unique random paths for obfuscation.
3Reliability
If multiple gateways are deployed to increase privacy, then obfuscation capability improves, but deployment and management costs increase
Solution Approach 1:
Each gateway in the network is designed to perform multiple functions: forwarding traffic, computing paths for other gateways, and serving as both source and destination for various traffic flows. This multi-functionality means that adding more gateways increases obfuscation capability without proportionally increasing management complexity, as each new gateway integrates into the existing universal gateway framework.
4Reliability
If traffic flows are routed through multiple intervening gateways, then privacy is enhanced, but traffic throughput and latency are impacted
Solution Approach 1:
The system dynamically changes routing parameters such as path length, number of hops, and gateway selection based on network conditions, traffic characteristics, and privacy requirements. By adjusting these parameters, the system can optimize the balance between privacy enhancement and traffic throughput, selecting shorter paths when throughput is critical and longer paths when maximum obfuscation is needed.
Data Source
AI summary
The presently disclosed privacy enhancing networks (PENs) comprises a network of gateways in communication with one or more controllers. By dynamically creating and tearing down unique data flow paths through a network of gateways for each individual data flow, the privacy enhancing network makes it more difficult for an adversary to glean information about communicating parties. Since each flow in a single data session may be routed through a different path, adversaries may find it more difficult to determine which data flows are associated with each data session. This in turn, makes it more difficult for adversaries to gather enough data traffic to break any encryption applied to the data flows. Furthermore, since each flow in a single data session can be directed along a different path, a privacy enhancing network may make it difficult for adversaries to even determine that the communicating parties are communicating at all.