Date of Award

5-2010

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Legacy Department

Computer Engineering

Committee Chair/Advisor

Brooks, Richard R

Committee Member

Schalkoff , Robert J

Committee Member

Russell , Harlan B

Abstract

In most secure communication standards today, additional latency is kept to a minimum to preserve the Quality-of-Service. As a result, it is possible to mount side-channel attacks using timing analysis. In this thesis we discuss the viability of these attacks, and demonstrate them by inferring Hidden Markov Models of protocols. These Hidden Markov Models can be used to both detect protocol use and infer information about protocol state. We create experiments that use Markov models to generate traffic and show that we can accurately reconstruct models under many circumstances. We analyze what occurs when timing delays have enough jitter that we can not accurately assign packets to bins. Finally, we show that we can accurately identify the language used for cryptographically protected interactive sessions - Italian or English - on-line with as few as 77 symbols. A maximum-likelihood estimator, the forward-backward procedure, and confidence interval analysis are compared.

Share

COinS
 
 

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.