Destination IP prefix-based routing protocols are core to Internet routing today. Internet autonomous systems (AS) possess fixed IP prefixes, while packets carry the intended destination AS's prefix in their headers, in clear text. As a result, network communications can be easily identified using IP addresses and become targets of a wide variety of attacks, such as DNS IP filtering, distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks, man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks, etc. In this work, we explore an alternative network architecture that fundamentally removes such vulnerabilities by disassociating the relationship between IP prefixes and destination networks, and by allowing any end-to-end communication session to have dynamic, short-lived, and pseudo-random IP addresses drawn from a range of IP prefixes rather than one. The concept is seemingly impossible to realize in todays Internet. We demonstrate how this is doable today with three different strategies using software defined networking (SDN), and how this can be done at scale to transform the Internet addressing and routing paradigms with the novel concept of a distributed software defined Internet exchange (SDX). The solution works with both IPv4 and IPv6, whereas the latter provides higher degrees of IP addressing freedom. Prototypes based on OpenvSwitches (OVS) have been implemented for experimentation across the PEERING BGP testbed. The SDX solution not only provides a technically sustainable pathway towards large-scale traffic analysis resistant network (TARN) support, it also unveils a new business model for customer driven, customizable and trustable end-to-end network services.
@cite_24: We present decoy routing, a mechanism capable of circumventing common network filtering strategies. Unlike other circumvention techniques, decoy routing does not require a client to connect to a specific IP address (which is easily blocked) in order to provide circumvention. We show that if it is possible for a client to connect to any unblocked host service, then decoy routing could be used to connect them to a blocked destination without cooperation from the host. This is accomplished by placing the circumvention service in the network itself – where a single device could proxy traffic between a significant fraction of hosts – instead of at the edge.
Decoy routing, a new alternative, inserts steganography information into the header of SSL packets which is recognized by decoy routers'' in the backbone, who re-route packets to their intended destination @cite_24 . One drawback is that nodes currently have to attempt connections at random until they find the decoy routing node.