"Traffic Analysis of Wireless Networks Using Signal Processing"

[Chris Laas]

I'm sitting in NE43-518 at LCS, where a talk by Craig Partridge that I
thought might interest you just finished.  He described how his group
at BBN has implemented successfully several techniques for traffic
analysis using methods from signal processing.  Essentially, they
convert series of samples consisting of a message originator and
timestamp into signals appropriate for signal analysis, and perform
correlation analyses on these signals.  From this, they derived
network topologies and conversation traces, as well as some other
interesting pieces of information about the network.

Partridge concludes that the techniques of delay dithering and adding
random packets are inneffective, since these just look like white
noise, easily dealt with by standard signal processing.  He agrees
that simply shaping traffic to a constant packet rate works, of
course, although it's expensive.  Perhaps those of you working on
onion routing may be interested in considering or refuting his
conclusions.

The event announcement was at:
http://www.lcs.mit.edu/calendar/eventView.phtml?Event_ID=184

Google suggests that the associated paper is:
http://www.ir.bbn.com/~krash/unpubs/TM1321.pdf

Cheers,
--Chris