A Queueing-Stability Criterion for Causal IPD-QIM Network Flow Watermarking

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14954v2
• Date: Fri, 17 Jul 2026 04:02:30 GMT
• Title: A Queueing-Stability Criterion for Causal IPD-QIM Network Flow Watermarking
• Abstract summary: Causality lets the embedder delay packets but never advance them, so each quantization-index-modulation alignment injects nonnegative dwell into a delay buffer.<n>We model the embedder as a reflected dwell queue under the fixed dual-lattice, equiprobable-bit rule.<n>We give a testable stable-embeddability criterion and a quantization-step configuration baseline for causal QIM network flow watermarking.
• Score: 9.96318277344866
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: On multi-hop encrypted links such as Tor and cascaded VPNs, tunneling flattens packet lengths and protocol fields, leaving inter-packet delay (IPD) as the main carrier for active flow attribution. Causality lets the embedder delay packets but never advance them, so each quantization-index-modulation (QIM) alignment injects nonnegative dwell into a delay buffer; unbounded dwell breaks lattice alignment and delays the host connection unacceptably. Whether a causal QIM watermark embeds stably on bursty traffic has largely been left to empirical configuration rather than analysis. We model the embedder as a reflected dwell queue under the fixed dual-lattice, equiprobable-bit rule, where injection is state-dependent -- set by the current interval and bit -- rather than exogenous. The substitution $Y_i=δ_i-r_i$ gives only an algebraic Lindley-form identity; stability is governed by the busy-state drift at large dwell, where the effective interval collapses to zero and the mean injection becomes $Δ/4$. Away from the critical boundary, the buffer is stable iff $μ_d>Δ/4$ (i.e. $Δ<4μ_d$) for i.i.d. backgrounds, and, under stationary-ergodic and finite-state Markov-modulated traffic with instantaneous overload, iff the time-average intensity $\barρ<1$. With the exogenous decoding floor $Δ\ge cσ_ξ$ ($c=4Q^{-1}(ε/2)$), this yields the operating window $Δ\in[cσ_ξ,4\barμ_d)$. Simulations confirm a sharp transition at $ρ=1$ set only by the mean; on four real IPD traces, with each simulated chain confined to a single flow, the criterion gives the correct stability direction under flow-local correlation and burstiness, while pooled cross-flow means overestimate the margin. These results give a testable stable-embeddability criterion and a quantization-step configuration baseline for causal QIM network flow watermarking.

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