Online Threats: Traffic Analysis

I dedicate this post to Softgeeek, who is the perfect online mentor and had previously assisted me in understanding lots of computelogical stuffs, especially on very sparse technical knowledge. A million thanks for making me realize that we are never 100% secure when we use the internet for data sending, unless we find a way to cure the problem permanently.

Even though i know most of you are not that paranoid till a state that you might want to block/deter anyone interested in analyzing your network's traffic, it is still a pretty useful knowledge. To confess in you, i did not use the knowledge i obtained in this particular field, because firstly, i am still a networking noob, and secondly, the process is pretty unnecessary for home users; as far as i know, only military officers will apply this kinda stuffs at large in their daily jobs, notably the US Military Defense Department & possibly, the CIA.

In computering knowledge, traffic analysis is the process of intercepting and examining messages in order to deduce information from patterns in communications. It can be utilized even when you have encrypted the contents of your data over the network and thus, is a really serious privacy issue. I predict that 95% of the world today did not even know the existence of this threat, or the risk it possess.

As cynical as i have been in discussing this topic, of course, there are methods to at least reduce the damage it might bring, though not eradicating the problem entirely. That method's idea is to make yourself anonymous over the internet, and to achieve that feat, there are two ways. The first, more difficult way to keep yourself anonymous over the web is through the modification of proxy or internet protocol (IP) address by means of manual configuration. The second, more easy-going method is to modify your proxy or IP address by means of software such as Steganos's Virtual Anonym. Which leads us to another important element in maintaining anonymity on the web- the concept of Onion Routing.

The paragraph below is Softgeeek's word-by-word tutorial on Onion Routing:

Onion Routing is a technique which helps you to be anonymous during the conversation/communication over a computer network. Communication are repeatedly encrypted and then sent through several network nodes called Onion Router. Each Onion Router removes a layer of encryption to uncover routing instructions, and sends the message to the next router where this is repeated. This prevents these intermediary nodes from knowing the origin, destination, and contents of the communication.

If you look at the picture, you can fairly understand the encryption of communication in such a network.

One software which utilizes the concept of Onion Routing is called Tor. Tor is a free software implementation of second-generation Onion Routing. It has been sponsored by US Naval Research Laboratory in the past. Tor became an Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) project in late 2004, and the EFF supported Tor financially until November 2005; now the entire project is being developed by the Tor Project Team since December 2006.

I'll stop at here, hoping that the information i gave you is ample enough to comprehend as a home user. If you would like to know more by doing your research on Tor (the Onion Router), you can visit their home page by clicking the link here.

To learn more about Steganos Internet Anonym, the online anonymity software, visit their official website by clicking here. Anyone wishing to download the software and use it can contact me for serial keys (required to activate the product).