A TCPdump file captures not only packets but also various “properties” related to the live TCP sessions on the Internet. It
is still an open problem to identify all the possible properties, if ever possible, and more importantly, which properties
really matter for the consumers of this particular TCPdump file and how they are related to each other. However, it is quite
clear that existing traffic replay tools, for the purpose of system evaluation, such as TCPreplay destroyed at least some
of critical properties such as “ghost acknowledgment” (while the origin packet has never been delivered), which is a critical
issue in conducting experimental evaluations for intrusion detection systems. In this paper, we present a software tool to
transform an existing TCPdump file into another traffic file with different “properties”. For instance, if the original traffic
is being captured in a laboratory environment, the new file might “appear” to be captured in between US and Sweden. The transformation
we have done here is “heuristically consistent” as there might be some hidden properties still being destroyed in the transformation
process. One interesting application of our tool is to build long-term profiles to detect anomalous TCP attacks without really
running the target application over the Internet. While, in this paper, we only focus on property-oriented traffic transformation,
we have built and evaluated an interactive version of this tool, called TCPopera, to evaluate commercial intrusion prevention
systems.