Liang Wang, Hyojoon Kim, Prateek Mittal, Jennifer Rexford &ndash; Princeton University, USA
RAVEN: Stateless Rapid IP Address Variation for Enterprise Networks.
Enterprise networks face increasing threats against the privacy of their clients. Existing enterprise services like Network Address Translation (NAT) offer limited privacy protection, at the cost of requiring per-flow state. In this paper, we introduce RAVEN (Rapid Address Variation for Enterprise Networks), a network-based privacy solution that is complementary to application-layer defenses. RAVEN protects privacy by frequently changing the client’s public IP address. With RAVEN, a client is not limited to using a single IP address at a given time, or even for a given connection. RAVEN goes further, breaking the association between packets that belong to the same connection by frequently changing the client’s IP address within a single connection. RAVEN achieves this through a novel division of labor: the client uses a transport protocol, like QUIC, that supports seamless connection migration, and decides when to switch its IP address, while the enterprise network actually changes the client’s IP address in a stateless manner at line rate and ensures end-to-end packet delivery. We implement RAVEN using QUIC and off-the-shelf programmable switches. We deploy RAVEN in a test IPv6 network and evaluate its defense against webpage fingerprinting attacks. Even with a strong adversary, the average precision of the best adaptive attacks drops from 0.96 to 0.84, with a 0.5% degradation in client throughput. When RAVEN changes IP addresses at unpredictable frequency, the precision of the best attacks falls to 0.78—the same effectiveness as WTF-PAD.
Webpages to fingerprint. To find webpages on GitHub Pages, we search the Common Crawl database [59] (Jan 2022 release) to extract URLs whose domain names end with “*.github.io”. From about 0.8 M URLs, we sampled 100 URLs as monitored webpages and 10,000 URLs as unmonitored. [...] [⁵⁹] The Common Crawl team. 2022. The Common Crawl Dataset. https://commoncrawl.org/.