Net Analysis

A lot of traditional computer security has focused on protecting the content of communications by insuring confidentiality, integrity or availability. Yet the meta data associated with it – the sender, the receiver, the time and length of messages – also contains important information in itself. It can also be used to quickly select targets for further surveillance, and extract information about communications content. Such traffic analysis techniques have been used in the closed military communities for a while but their systematic study is an emerging field in the open security community. This talk will present an overview of traffic analysis techniques, and how they can be used to extract data from ‘secure’ systems.