Defending against traffic analysis attacks with link padding for bursty traffics

Preventing networks from being attacked has become a critical issue for network administrators and researchers. Even for systems where encryption is used they are still vulnerable to traffic analysis attacks. Attackers can launch catastrophic distributed denial of services attacks based on the critical link information derived from traffic analysis. Link padding can be used to defend against such traffic analysis attacks. In this paper, we propose a robust variant packet sending-interval link padding algorithm for bursty traffics. The histogram feature vector method is used to simulate the traffic analysis attack and principle component analysis is used to test the performance of the algorithm.