All prior decoy routing systems (Cirripede, Telex, TapDance, Slitheen, Waterfall) require the DR to inspect every traversing flow — either all TCP SYN packets or all TLS flows — to identify DR requests, creating a privacy breach for non-DR users and a computational bottleneck. SiegeBreaker eliminates this by using an out-of-band email pre-registration (encrypted to the controller's 2048-bit RSA public key) that pins the controller's inspection rule to a single client-IP/OD-IP/ISN triple, so only authenticated potential DR flows are ever redirected.
From 2020-sharma-siegebreaker — SiegeBreaker: An SDN Based Practical Decoy Routing System
· §3, §4.3
· 2020
· Privacy Enhancing Technologies
Implications
Separating the DR signaling channel (out-of-band, e.g., TLS-encrypted email) from the data channel allows a DR operator to scope per-flow cryptographic inspection to confirmed DR clients only, removing both the privacy risk to co-located users and the throughput cost of inspecting all flows.
Any out-of-band pre-registration scheme must account for adversarial email delay or blocking; issuing per-client unique controller email IDs and adding controller acknowledgment emails are practical mitigations, at the cost of higher bootstrapping latency.