On the fractal characteristics of Internet network traffic and its utilization in covert communications

Abstract

There are many models in the literature that consider the main characteristics of Internet traffic either by processing the real measurements of traffic in the time- or frequency-domain. In this paper we use the latter approach and introduce a novel method to capture the fractal behavior of Internet traffic in which we adopt a random scaling fractal model to simulate the self-affine characteristics of the Internet traffic. In this paper we utilize the self-affine nature of Internet traffic in order to disguise the transmission of a digital file by splitting the file into a number of binary blocks (files) whose size and submission times are compatible with the bursty lengths of Internet traffic. We shall examine two different time series. The Sizes series consists of the actual packet sizes as individual packet arrive, and the inter-arrival series consists of timestamps differences between consecutive packets.