Filename: xxx-netflow-padding.txt Title: Padding for netflow record resolution reduction Authors: Mike Perry Created: 20 August 2015 Status: Draft

0. Motivation

It is common practice by many ISPs to record data about the activity of endpoints that use their uplink, if nothing else for billing purposes, but sometimes also for monitoring for attacks and general failure.

Unfortunately, Tor node operators typically have no control over the data recorded and retained by their ISP. They are often not even informed about their ISP's retention policy, or the associated data sharing policy of those records (which tends to be "give them to whoever asks" in practice[1]).

It is also likely that defenses for this problem will prove useful against proposed data retention plans in the EU and elsewhere, since these schemes will likely rely on the same technology.

0.1. Background

At the ISP level, this data typically takes the form of Netflow, jFlow, Netstream, or IPFIX flow records. These records are emitted by gateway routers in a raw form and then exported (often over plaintext) to a "collector" that either records them verbatim, or reduces their granularity further[2].

Netflow records and the associated data collection and retention tools are very configurable, and have many modes of operation, especially when configured to handle high throughput. However, at ISP scale, per-flow records are very likely to be employed, since they are the default, and also provide very high resolution in terms of endpoint activity, second only to full packet and/or header capture.

Per-flow records record the endpoint connection 5-tuple, as well as the total number of bytes sent and received by that 5-tuple during a particular time period. They can store additional fields as well, but it is primarily timing and bytecount information that concern us.

When configured to provide per-flow data, routers emit these raw flow records periodically for all active connections passing through them based on two parameters: the "active flow timeout" and the "inactive flow timeout".

The "active flow timeout" causes the router to emit a new record periodically for every active TCP session that continuously sends data. The default active flow timeout for most routers is 30 minutes, meaning that a new record is created for every TCP session at least every 30 minutes, no matter what. This value can be configured to be from 1 minute to 60 minutes on major routers.

The "inactive flow timeout" is used by routers to create a new record if a TCP session is inactive for some number of seconds. It allows routers to avoid the need to track a large number of idle connections in memory, and instead emit a separate record only when there is activity. This value ranges from 10 seconds to 600 seconds on common routers. It appears as though no routers support a value lower than 10 seconds.

0.2. Default timeout values of major routers

For reference, here are default values and ranges (in parenthesis when known) for common routers, along with citations to their manuals.

Some routers speak other collection protocols than Netflow, and in the case of Juniper, use different timeouts for these protocols. Where this is known to happen, it has been noted.

Inactive Timeout Active Timeout Cisco IOS[3] 15s (10-600s) 30min (1-60min) Cisco Catalyst[4] 5min 32min Juniper (jFlow)[5] 15s (10-600s) 30min (1-60min) Juniper (Netflow)[6,7] 60s (10-600s) 30min (1-30min) H3C (Netstream)[8] 60s (60-600s) 30min (1-60min) Fortinet[9] 15s 30min MicroTik[10] 15s 30min

1. Proposal Overview

The combination of the active and inactive netflow record timeouts allow us to devise a low-cost padding defense that causes what would otherwise be split records to "collapse" at the router even before they are exported to the collector for storage. So long as a connection transmits data before the "inactive flow timeout" expires, then the router will continue to count the total bytes on that flow before finally emitting a record at the "active flow timeout".

This means that for a minimal amount of padding that prevents the "inactive flow timeout" from expiring, it is possible to reduce the resolution of raw per-flow netflow data to the total amount of bytes send and received in a 30 minute window. This is a vast reduction in resolution for HTTP, IRC, XMPP, SSH, and other intermittent interactive traffic, especially when all user traffic in that time period is multiplexed over a single connection (as it is with Tor).

2. Implementation

Tor clients currently maintain one TLS connection to their Guard node to carry actual application traffic, and make up to 3 additional connections to other nodes to retrieve directory information.

We propose to pad only the client's connection to the Guard node, and not any other connection. We propose to treat Bridge node connections to the Tor network as client connections, and pad them, but otherwise not pad between normal relays.

Both clients and Guards will maintain a timer for all application (ie: non-directory) TLS connections. Every time a non-padding packet is sent or received by either end, that endpoint will sample a timeout value from between 4 seconds and 14 seconds. If the connection becomes active for any reason before this timer expires, the timer is reset to a new random value between 4 and 14 seconds. If the connection remains inactive until the timer expires, a single CELL_PADDING cell will be sent on that connection.

In this way, the connection will only be padded in the event that it is idle.

2.1. Tunable parameters

We propose that the defense be controlled by the following consensus parameters:

* nf_ito_low - The low end of the range to send padding when inactive, in ms. - Default: 4000 * nf_ito_high - The high end of the range to send padding, in ms. - Default: 14000

* nf_pad_relays - If set to 1, we also pad inactive relay-to-relay connections - Default: 0

* conn_timeout_low - The low end of the range to decide when we should close an idle connection (not counting padding). - Default: 900 seconds after last circuit closes

* conn_timeout_high - The high end of the range to decide when we should close an idle connection. - Default: 1800 seconds after last circuit close

If nf_ito_low == nf_ito_high == 0, padding will be disabled.

2.2. Maximum overhead bounds

With the default parameters, we expect a padded connection to send one padding cell every 8 seconds (see Appendix A for the statistical analysis of expected padding packet rate on an idle link). This averages to 63 bytes per second, assuming a 512 byte cell and 55 bytes of TLS+TCP+IP headers. For a connection that remains idle for a full 30 minutes of inactivity, this is about 112KB of overhead.

With 2.5M completely idle clients connected simultaneously, 63 bytes per second still amounts to only 157MB/second network-wide, which is roughly 1.5X the current amount of Tor directory traffic[11]. Of course, our 2.5M daily users will neither be connected simultaneously, nor entirely idle, so we expect the actual overhead to be much lower than this.

If we choose to set the range such it is no longer even possible to configure an inactive timeout low enough such that a new record would be generated, (for example: 6.5 to 9.5 seconds for an average of 8 seconds), then the maximum possible overhead is 70 bytes/second, 125KB per connection, and 175MB/sec network-wide.

2.3. Measuring actual overhead

To measure the actual padding overhead in practice, we propose to export the following statistics in extra-info descriptors for the previous (fixed, non-rolling) 24 hour period:

* Total cells read (padding and non-padding) * Total cells written (padding and non-padding) * Total CELL_PADDING cells read * Total CELL_PADDING cells written * Total RELAY_COMMAND_DROP cells read * Total RELAY_COMMAND_DROP cells written

These values will be rounded to 100 cells each, and no values are reported if the relay has read or written less than 10000 cells in the previous period.

RELAY_COMMAND_DROP cells are circuit-level padding not used by this defense, but we may as well start recording statistics about them now, too, to aid in the development of future defenses.

2.4. Load balancing considerations

Eventually, we will likely want to update the consensus weights to properly load balance the selection of Guard nodes that must carry this overhead.

We propose that we use the extra-info documents to get a more accurate value for the total average Guard and Guard+Exit node overhead of this defense in practice, and then use that value to fractionally reduce the consensus selection weights for Guard nodes and Guard+Exit nodes, to reflect their reduced capacity relative to middle nodes.

3. Threat model and adversarial considerations

This defense does not assume fully adversarial behavior on the part of the upstream network administrator, as that administrator typically has no specific interest in trying to deanonymize Tor, but only in monitoring their own network for signs of overusage, attack, or failure.

Therefore, in a manner closer to the "honest but curious" threat model, we assume that the netflow collector will be using standard equipment not specifically tuned to capturing Tor traffic. We want to reduce the resolution of logs that are collected incidentally, so that if they happen to fall into the wrong hands, we can be more certain will not be useful.

We feel that this assumption is a fair one because correlation attacks (and statistical attacks in general) will tend to accumulate false positives very quickly if the adversary loses resolution at any observation points. It is especially unlikely for the the attacker to benefit from only a few high-resolution collection points while the remainder of the Tor network is only subject to connection-level netflow configuration data retention, or even less data retention than that.

Nonetheless, it is still worthwhile to consider what the adversary is capable of, especially in light of looming data retention regulation.

Because no major router appears to have the ability to set the inactive flow timeout below 10 seconds, it would seem as though the adversary is left with three main options: reduce the active record timeout to the minimum (1 minute), begin logging full packet and/or header data, or develop a custom solution.

It is an open question to what degree these approaches would help the adversary, especially if only some of its observation points implemented these changes.

3.1 What about sampled data?

At scale, it is known that some Internet backbone routers at AS boundaries and exchanges perform sampled packet header collection and/or produce netflow records based on a subset of the packets that pass through their infrastructure.

The effects of this against Tor were studied before against the (much smaller) Tor network as it was in 2007[12]. At sampling rate of 1 out of every 2000 packets, the attack did not achieve high accuracy until over 100MB of data were transmitted, even when correlating only 500 flows in a closed-world lab setting.

We suspect that this type of attack is unlikely to be effective at scale on the Tor network today, but we make no claims that this defense will make any impact upon sampled correlation, primarily because the amount of padding that this defense introduces is comparatively low relative to the amount of transmitted traffic that sampled correlation attacks require to attain any accuracy.

3.2. What about long-term statistical disclosure?

This defense similarly does not claim to defeat long-term correlation attacks involving many observations over large amounts of time.

However, we do believe it will significantly increase the amount of traffic and the number of independent observations required to attain the same accuracy if the adversary uses default per-flow netflow records.

3.3. What about prior information/confirmation?

In truth, the most dangerous aspect of these netflow logs is not actually correlation at all, but confirmation.

If the adversary has prior information about the location of a target, and/or when and how that target is expected to be using Tor, then the effectiveness of this defense will be very situation-dependent (on factors such as the number of other tor users in the area at that time, etc).

In any case, the odds that there is other concurrent activity (to create a false positive) within a single 30 minute record are much higher than the odds that there is concurrent activity that aligns with a subset of a series of smaller, more frequent inactive timeout records.

4. Synergistic effects with future padding and other changes

Because this defense only sends padding when the OR connection is completely idle, it should still operate optimally when combined with other forms of padding (such as padding for website traffic fingerprinting and hidden service circuit fingerprinting). If those future defenses choose to send padding for any reason at any layer of Tor, then this defense automatically will not.

In addition to interoperating optimally with any future padding defenses, simple changes to Tor network usage can serve to further reduce the usefulness of any data retention, as well as reduce the overhead from this defense.

For example, if all directory traffic were also tunneled through the main Guard node instead of independent directory guards, then the adversary would lose additional resolution in terms of the ability to differentiate directory traffic from normal usage, especially when it is occurs within the same netflow record. As written and specified, the defense will pad such tunneled directory traffic optimally.

Similarly, if bridge guards[13] are implemented such that bridges use their own guard node to route all of their connecting client traffic through, then users who run bridges bridges will also benefit from the concurrent traffic of their connected clients, which will also be optimally padded when it is concurrent with their own.

Appendix A: Padding Cell Timeout Distribution Statistics

It turns out that because the padding is bidirectional, and because both endpoints are maintaining timers, this creates the situation where the time before sending a padding packet in either direction is actually min(client_timeout, server_timeout).

If client_timeout and server_timeout are uniformly sampled, then the distribution of min(client_timeout,server_timeout) is no longer uniform, and the resulting average timeout (Exp[min(X,X)]) is much lower than the midpoint of the timeout range.

To compensate for this, instead of sampling each endpoint timeout uniformly, we instead sample it from max(X,X), where X is uniformly distributed.

If X is a random variable uniform from 0..R-1 (where R=high-low), then the random variable Y = max(X,X) has Prob(Y == i) = (2.0*i + 1)/(R*R).

Then, when both sides apply timeouts sampled from Y, the resulting bidirectional padding packet rate is now third random variable: Z = min(Y,Y).

The distribution of Z is slightly bell-shaped, but mostly flat around the mean. It also turns out that Exp[Z] ~= Exp[X]. Here's a table of average values for each random variable:

R Exp[X] Exp[Z] Exp[min(X,X)] Exp[Y=max(X,X)] 5000 2499.5 2662 1666.2 3332.8 6000 2999.5 3195 1999.5 3999.5 10000 4999.5 5328 3332.8 6666.2 15000 7499.5 7995 4999.5 9999.5 20000 9900.5 10661 6666.2 13332.8

In this way, we maintain the property that the midpoint of the timeout range is the expected mean time before a padding packet is sent in either direction.

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