Traffic Analysis
Even if perfect cryptographic routines are used, the attacker can gain knowledge of the amount of traffic that was generated. The attacker might not know what Alice and Bob were talking about, but can know that they were talking and how much they talked. In certain circumstances this can be very bad. Consider for example when a military is organising a secret attack against another nation: it may suffice to alert the other nation for them to know merely that there is a lot of secret activity going on.
As another example, when encrypting Voice Over IP streams that use variable bit rate encoding, the number of bits per unit of time is not obscured, and this can be exploited to guess spoken phrases.
Padding messages is a way to make it harder to do traffic analysis. Normally, a number of random bits are appended to the end of the message with an indication at the end how much this random data is. The randomness should have a minimum value of 0, a maximum number of N and an even distribution between the two extremes. Note that increasing 0 does not help, only increasing N helps, though that also means that a lower percentage of the channel will be used to transmit real data. Also note that, since the cryptographic routine is assumed to be uncrackable (otherwise the padding length itself is crackable), it does not help to put the padding anywhere else, e.g. at the beginning, in the middle, or in a sporadic manner. For the same reason, padding can be structured (e.g. it can simply be a set of zeros) - though structured padding can be hazard, as explained in timing attack.
Read more about this topic: Padding (cryptography)
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