Implementation of Network Level Security Process through Stepping Stones by Watermarking Methodology

Network based attacks have become a serious threat to the critical information infrastructure on which we depend .Identifying the source of the attackers behind the stepping stone(s), it is necessary to correlate the incoming and outgoing flows or connections of a stepping stone. To resist attempts at correlation, the attacker may encrypt or otherwise manipulate the connection traffic. Timing based correlation approaches have been shown to be quite effective in correlating encrypted connections. However, timing based correlation approaches are subject to timing perturbations that may be deliberately introduced by the attacker at stepping stones. In this paper we propose a novel watermark-based correlation scheme that is designed specifically to be robust against timing perturbations. Unlike most previous timing based correlation approaches, our watermark-based approach is “active” in that it embeds a unique watermark into the encrypted flows by slightly adjusting the timing of selected packets. The unique watermark that is embedded in the encrypted flow gives us a number of advantages over passive timing based correlation in resisting timing perturbations by the attacker.