Date of Award

2009

Degree Type

Thesis

Department

Electrical and Computer Engineering

First Advisor

Zhu, Ye

Subject Headings

Internet telephony -- Security measures, Computer networks -- Security measures

Abstract

The increasing popularity of VoIP telephony has brought a lot of attention and concern over security and privacy issues of VoIP communication. This thesis proposes a new class of traffic analysis attacks to encrypted VoIP calls. The goal of these attacks is to detect speaker or speech of encrypted VoIP calls. The proposed traffic analysis attacks exploit silent suppression, an essential feature of VoIP telephony. These attacks are based on application-level features so that the attacks can detect the same speech or the same speaker of different VoIP calls made with different VoIP codecs. We evaluate the proposed attacks by extensive experiments over different type of networks including commercialized anonymity networks and campus networks. The experiments show that the proposed traffic analysis attacks can detect speaker and speech of encrypted VoIP calls with a high detection rate which is a great improvement comparing with random guess. With the help of intersection attacks, the detection rate for speaker detection can be increased. In order to shield the detrimental effect of this proposed attacks, a countermeasure is proposed to mitigate the proposed traffic analysis attacks

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