Smart collaborative distribution for privacy enhancement in moving target defense

Abstract

The Moving Target Defense (MTD) has been widely discussed in many communities to upgrade the network reliability, survivability, dependability, etc. However, utilizing MTD in privacy protection still needs more investigations. In this paper, we propose a smart collaborative distribution scheme to enhance the privacy based on MTD guidelines. A target application scenario is the Domain Name System (DNS) that is experiencing serious and complex privacy issues. The preliminary and potential risks are firstly analyzed based on DNS attack approaches, DNS server locations and the vulnerability of user privacy. Then, the details of our scheme are illustrated through port number assignment patterns, main procedures of dynamic port hopping and the implementation method. To quantitatively evaluate the performance, an analytical model was established from theoretical perspectives. The relationships between multiple parameters and overall system capacity are explored as well. The validation results demonstrate that the smart collaborative distribution is able to improve the privacy without affecting the basic DNS functionality. (C) 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.