Anonymous network communication based on SDN

Abstract

As more and more personal information is used in network services, network anonymity has received more and more attention. Attackers could endanger the victims’ privacy by attacking or eavesdropping nodes during the networks routing. For example, attackers could retrieve the IP and MAC address of victims from network traffics, and use it to corelate the network behavior to individuals. The emerging Software Defined Network (SDN) technique provides a pretty flexible platform that can control the whole network by software programming, which propose a new solution to realize the network anonymity problem. In this paper, we propose a solution based on SDN to anonymize both MAC and IP addresses of network traffics in order to mitigate the privacy threats, and programing it. Furthermore, we test the anonymity function on our SDN Testbed. Our solution supports two working modes: a two-way anonymous mode which anonymizes the IP and MAC addresses of all data packets, and an one-way anonymous mode which anonymizes MAC and IP addresses of senders.