Title
Keeping the Smart Home Private with Smart(er) IoT Traffic Shaping
Abstract
The proliferation of smart home Internet of Things (IoT) devices presents unprecedented challenges for preserving privacy within the home. In this paper, we demonstrate that a passive network observer (e.g., an Internet service provider) can infer private in-home activities by analyzing Internet traffic from commercially available smart home devices even when the devices use end-to-end transport-layer encryption. We evaluate common approaches for defending against these types of traffic analysis attacks, including firewalls, virtual private networks, and independent link padding, and find that none sufficiently conceal user activities with reasonable data overhead. We develop a new defense, stochastic traffic padding (STP), that makes it difficult for a passive network adversary to reliably distinguish genuine user activities from generated traffic patterns designed to look like user interactions. Our analysis provides a theoretical bound on an adversaryu0027s ability to accurately detect genuine user activities as a function of the amount of additional cover traffic generated by the defense technique.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.2478/popets-2019-0040
privacy enhancing technologies
Field
DocType
Volume
Information technology,Computer science,Computer security,Internet of Things,Home automation,Traffic shaping
Journal
2019
Issue
Citations 
PageRank 
3
12
0.68
References 
Authors
25
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Noah J. Apthorpe1898.53
Danny Yuxing Huang21108.15
Dillon Reisman3383.36
Arvind Narayanan42742151.72
Nick Feamster54736390.57