Waterfall
Agile framework for the development and deployment of watermarking schemes
Traffic watermarking is a powerful but underutilized technique for network traffic analysis, primarily applied today in evaluating the security of anonymity systems like Tor. This project aims to develop Waterfall, a system designed to provide a unified, flexible framework for the development and deployment of a variety of traffic watermarking schemes. Waterfall operates by intercepting network traffic, embedding and detecting watermarks at multiple points in the network. The goal of Waterfall is to be versatile enough to replicate representative watermarking schemes from the research literature, while adapting them to be more effective and creating new versions. In addition, Waterfall allows the analysis of new protocols such as Tor's Conflux protocol, a recent improvement in Tor's performance that may also increase its susceptibility to watermarking attacks.
Run by Ruhr University Bochum
This project was funded through the NGI0 Commons Fund, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet programme, under the aegis of DG Communications Networks, Content and Technology under grant agreement No 101135429. Additional funding is made available by the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI).
