MIC: An Efficient Anonymous Communication System in Data Center Networks

With the rapid growth of application migration, the anonymity in data center networks becomes important in breaking attack chains and guaranteeing user privacy. However, existing anonymity systems are designed for the Internet environment, which suffer from high computational and network resource consumption and deliver low performance, thus failing to be directly deployed in data centers. In order to address this problem, this paper proposes an efficient and easily deployed anonymity scheme for SDN-based data centers, called MIC. The main idea behind MIC is to conceal the communication participants by modifying the source/destination addresses (such as MAC, IP and port) at switch nodes, so as to achieve anonymity. Compared with the traditional overlay-based approaches, our in-network scheme has shorter transmission paths and less intermediate operations, thus achieving higher performance with less overhead. We also propose a collision avoidance mechanism to ensure the correctness of routing, and two mechanisms to enhance the traffic-analysis resistance. Our security analysis demonstrates that MIC ensures unlinkability and improves traffic-analysis resistance. Our experiments show that MIC has extremely low overhead compared with the base-line TCP (or SSL), e.g., less than 1% overhead in terms of throughput.