DataSoft/Nova — Issue #1: Defeat passive identification attack with Steganography
Author: DataSoft
Created: 2012-02-16 19:22:42+00:00
State: open

The "passive identification attack" can be thought of as when an attacker can listen to packets over the network and notices that packets are leaving a machine (encrypted or not) from a port known to be used by Nova.

This would tip off the attacker that Nova is being used on that particular machine. Something we want to avoid.

Mere TLS encryption doesn't help in this instance, as the port number remains in plaintext. (Or else the recipient wouldn't know how to handle the incoming data)

Come up with some way of preventing this.

One idea is to send packets such that they appear to be originating from haystack nodes on their respective open ports to other haystack nodes. The packet would get received by Nova on the other end, decrypted, and parsed. It would appear just like two arbitrary nodes are talking on an open port.