An efficient hexadecimal network flow watermark method for tracking attack traffic.

Area of Science:

• Computer Science
• Cybersecurity
• Network Security

Background:

• Network flow watermark technology marks attack traffic but struggles with efficiency and robustness against evolving threats.
• Current methods often fail to balance watermark robustness with the speed and low packet count of modern network attacks, limiting practicality.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose an efficient hexadecimal network flow watermark method to address limitations in existing techniques.
• To enhance the practicality of network flow watermarking for tracing attack flows in real-world environments.

Main Methods:

• Introduced an efficient interval watermark algorithm and an interval synchronization algorithm for self-learning watermark parameters.
• Incorporated watermark start and end markers to improve practicality and enable traceability of attack flows.

Main Results:

• Achieved a watermark detection success rate above 95% even with network jitter, validated through real network traffic experiments.
• Demonstrated a 50% improvement in encoding and decoding efficiency compared to existing schemes while maintaining robustness.
• Exhibited excellent resistance to network jitter, packet loss, and false packet insertion.

Conclusions:

• The proposed hexadecimal network flow watermark method offers a practical and efficient solution for identifying and tracing network attack flows.
• The method significantly improves upon existing techniques in terms of efficiency, robustness, and resilience to network disturbances.