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A survey on network flow watermarking: A problem-oriented perspective
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AI
DOI：10.1016/j.cose.2025.104813.png)
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Abstract
En 中文
Network flow watermarking is an active tracing approach by embedding the source node identity information into network flows invisibly. The embedded watermarks coexist with the original network traffic, which are designed with robustness against network noises and active interferences. In recent years, network flow watermarking enters a phase of profound development in face of various challenges on practical applications (e.g. deanonymization, data leakage tracing, malicious behavior monitoring) in Internet. However, to our best knowledge, there are very few surveys for the network flow watermarking methods after 2018, for which the systematic survey covering the entire developments is absent. Meanwhile, current surveys classify and analyze network flow watermarking based on embedding patterns, which ignore different methods correlations on critical problems for watermarking. To this end, the paper reviews and analyzes the papers from 2001 to 2025 on network flow watermarking in perspective of problem-orientations. The threat model and theoretical framework are established to model the watermarking embedding and detecting procedures, which offer a consistent model for watermarking design. From three core problems on robustness, invisibility and adaptation, network flow watermarking methods are classified into different solutions to these problems, which depict an explicit network flow watermarking development roadmap. For sake of facilitating practical applications, five open problems as the critical challenges are discussed, providing references for the future work on network flow watermarking.
Journal
C
IF:
5.4
Papers:
189
Citations:
0