BASH Haystack Generator was initially created purely as an intellectual exercise aimed at analysis of masking 'genuine' traffic across an encrypted tunnel by generating additional traffic
The overall aim being to see whether it's feasibly possible (i.e. without wasting exorbitant amounts of bandwidth) to negate the risk of traffic level analysis by an adversary (on the assumption they're unable to decrypt the traffic).
The project itself simply generates traffic, it's up to the administrator to ensure that the traffic is routed over the relevant tunnel (whether that's a VPN, Tor, an SSH tunnel or anything else).
One thing the project doesn't try to address is the issue of an adversary who's also able to monitor traffic at your endpoint (i.e. if you're using a VPN, is 'public' traffic then emanating from the endpoint). In theory, at least, this would be less of an issue with Tor.
Codebase: Hosted on
GitHub