Demonstration of unobservable voice over IP

Abstract

We describe UV: a two-node system for unobservable voice communication on the Internet. UV provides unobservability of communication by hiding the fact that there is a conversation taking place. To achieve this, the system uses techniques such as encryption, constant traffic generation, equal packet sizes, and a fixed packet sending schedule. We evaluate the influence of the constant traffic generation on the general performance of UV with experiments on the Internet and in a wireless setting simulated with network simulator NS2. We conclude that although the requirements for privacy protection and usability are often mutually exclusive, they can still be combined in a way that they offer both reasonable performance and good privacy protection.