arXiv:1302.5734v2 [cs.CR] 14 Jun 2013 1 Invisible Flow Watermarks for Channels with Dependent Substitution, Deletion, and Bursty Insertion Errors (Draft) Xun Gong, Student Member, IEEE, Mavis Rodrigues, Negar Kiyavash, Member, IEEE Abstract Flow watermarks efficiently link packet flows in a network in order to thwart various attacks such as stepping stones. We study the problem of designing good flow watermarks. Earlier flow watermarking schemes mostly considered substitution errors, neglecting the effects of packet insertions and deletions that commonly happen within a network. More recent schemes consider packet deletions but often at the expense of the watermark visibility. We present an invisible flow watermarking scheme capable of enduring a large number of packet losses and insertions. To maintain invisibility, our scheme uses quantization index modulation (QIM) to embed the watermark into inter-packet delays, as opposed to time intervals including many packets. As the watermark is injected within individual packets, packet losses and insertions may lead to watermark desynchronization and substitution errors. To address this issue, we add a layer of error-correction coding to our scheme. Experimental results on both synthetic and real network traces demonstrate that our scheme is robust to network jitter, packet drops and splits, while remaining invisible to an attacker. This work was supported in part by AFOSR under Grant FA9550-11-1-0016, MURI under AFOSR Grant FA9550-10-1-0573, and NSF CCF 10-54937 CAR. This work was presented in part at ICASSP’12 [1]. X. Gong is with the Coordinated Science Laboratory and the Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801 USA (email: xungong1@illinois.edu) M. Rodrigues was with the Coordinated Science Laboratory and the Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801 USA (email:mavis.rodrigues@gmail.com) N. Kiyavash is with the Coordinated Science Laboratory and the Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801 USA (email: kiyavash@illinois.edu) October 17, 2018 DRAFT