EigenObfu: A Novel Network Topology Obfuscation Defense Method

Abstract

Link flooding attack is a kind of attack based on the topology information of a network. Sophisticated attackers tend to conduct network reconnaissance before they launch effective attacks to infer key information about the whole network. Existing active defense methods against link flooding attacks either focus on protecting the key links within the network or safeguarding the key nodes with the simple degree centrality. This paper proposes a novel network topology obfuscation method called EigenObfu to protect the key nodes. Instead of using the degree centrality in existing defense methods, our eigenvector centrality-based EigenObfu comprehensively utilizes network topology information and better measures the importance of nodes in a network. EigenObfu is designed to output a secure obfuscated topology suitable for networks, regardless of their sizes, by hiding important nodes while maintaining connectivity and ensuring the protection of key nodes. We evaluate EigenObfu through several comparison experiments on nine different topologies. The results confirm the effectiveness of our method.