Hiding cloud network access patterns for enhanced privacy

Abstract

The cybersecurity landscape in the last years has evolved significantly. Considering the fact that more than 281 million people were affected by cyber-threads in 2021 with an estimated financial impact of more than $15.680 million, the research for security mechanisms for better services has risen significantly. One of the most active trends in cybersecurity offensive procedures is perimeter breaching. This represents the incipient step that attackers take when they target external networks. On average the penetration of the internal networks takes no more than two days, therefore, the defense mechanisms should comply with this hard deadline. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a real-time approach that solves the privacy issues posed by network protocol profiling and surveillance. This can be done by disguising the generated traffic using different transport protocols like chat or gaming services. In order to choose the right channels which can be used, we identified the most prominent ones like Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) or Internet Relay Chat (IRC) chat and the AllJoyn network, a service used mainly for multiplayer communication in gaming environments on mobile terminals. We evaluate the proposed solution considering metrics such as time frame, speed, and rate limiting delay.