TARN: A SDN-based Traffic Analysis Resistant Network Architecture
Lu Yu, Qing Wang, Geddings Barrineau, Jon Oakley, Richard, R. Brooks, Kuang-Ching Wang

TL;DR
This paper proposes a novel SDN-based network architecture called TARN that enhances privacy and security by disassociating IP addresses from destination networks, enabling dynamic, pseudo-random IP addresses to resist traffic analysis and attacks.
Contribution
It introduces a scalable SDN-based approach to fundamentally change Internet addressing, creating a traffic analysis resistant network with prototypes on existing testbeds.
Findings
Demonstrated feasibility with SDN strategies on IPv4 and IPv6.
Implemented prototypes using OpenvSwitches on BGP testbed.
Showed potential for large-scale, secure, and customizable network services.
Abstract
Destination IP prefix-based routing protocols are core to Internet routing today. Internet autonomous systems (AS) possess fixed IP prefixes, while packets carry the intended destination AS's prefix in their headers, in clear text. As a result, network communications can be easily identified using IP addresses and become targets of a wide variety of attacks, such as DNS/IP filtering, distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks, man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks, etc. In this work, we explore an alternative network architecture that fundamentally removes such vulnerabilities by disassociating the relationship between IP prefixes and destination networks, and by allowing any end-to-end communication session to have dynamic, short-lived, and pseudo-random IP addresses drawn from a range of IP prefixes rather than one. The concept is seemingly impossible to realize in todays Internet. We…
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