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Attacking and Protecting Tunneled Traffic of Smart Home Devices

Published: 16 March 2020 Publication History

Abstract

The number of smart home IoT (Internet of Things) devices has been growing fast in recent years. Along with the great benefits brought by smart home devices, new threats have appeared. One major threat to smart home users is the compromise of their privacy by traffic analysis (TA) attacks. Researchers have shown that TA attacks can be performed successfully on either plain or encrypted traffic to identify smart home devices and infer user activities. Tunneling traffic is a very strong countermeasure to existing TA attacks. However, in this work, we design a Signature based Tunneled Traffic Analysis (STTA) attack that can be effective even on tunneled traffic. Using a popular smart home traffic dataset, we demonstrate that our attack can achieve an 83% accuracy on identifying 14 smart home devices. We further design a simple defense mechanism based on adding uniform random noise to effectively protect against our TA attack without introducing too much overhead. We prove that our defense mechanism achieves approximate differential privacy.

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Safeguarding User-Centric Privacy in Smart HomesACM Transactions on Internet Technology10.1145/370172624:4(1-33)Online publication date: 18-Nov-2024
  • (2024)HomeSentinel: Intelligent Anti-Fingerprinting for IoT Traffic in Smart HomesIEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security10.1109/TIFS.2024.338258919(4780-4793)Online publication date: 2024
  • (2024)SAfER: Simplified Auto-encoder for (Anomalous) Event Recognition2024 20th International Conference on Distributed Computing in Smart Systems and the Internet of Things (DCOSS-IoT)10.1109/DCOSS-IoT61029.2024.00041(229-233)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2024
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cover image ACM Conferences
CODASPY '20: Proceedings of the Tenth ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy
March 2020
392 pages
ISBN:9781450371070
DOI:10.1145/3374664
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 16 March 2020

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Author Tags

  1. attacks
  2. defenses
  3. differential privacy
  4. internet of things (iot)
  5. privacy
  6. smart homes
  7. traffic analysis (ta)

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  • Research-article

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  • NSF
  • Saudi Arabian Cultural Mission

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CODASPY '20
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Overall Acceptance Rate 149 of 789 submissions, 19%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Safeguarding User-Centric Privacy in Smart HomesACM Transactions on Internet Technology10.1145/370172624:4(1-33)Online publication date: 18-Nov-2024
  • (2024)HomeSentinel: Intelligent Anti-Fingerprinting for IoT Traffic in Smart HomesIEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security10.1109/TIFS.2024.338258919(4780-4793)Online publication date: 2024
  • (2024)SAfER: Simplified Auto-encoder for (Anomalous) Event Recognition2024 20th International Conference on Distributed Computing in Smart Systems and the Internet of Things (DCOSS-IoT)10.1109/DCOSS-IoT61029.2024.00041(229-233)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2024
  • (2023)A Novel Traffic Obfuscation Technology for Smart HomeElectronics10.3390/electronics1216347712:16(3477)Online publication date: 17-Aug-2023
  • (2023)Encrypted Voice Traffic Fingerprinting: An Adaptive Network Traffic Feature Encoding ModelICC 2023 - IEEE International Conference on Communications10.1109/ICC45041.2023.10279018(3768-3773)Online publication date: 28-May-2023
  • (2022)HomeMonitor: An Enhanced Device Event Detection Method for Smart Home EnvironmentSensors10.3390/s2223938922:23(9389)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2022
  • (2022)Classification of Encrypted IoT Traffic despite Padding and ShapingProceedings of the 21st Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society10.1145/3559613.3563191(1-13)Online publication date: 7-Nov-2022
  • (2022)Network Traffic Shaping for Enhancing Privacy in IoT SystemsIEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking10.1109/TNET.2021.314017430:3(1162-1177)Online publication date: 12-Jan-2022
  • (2022)A Survey of Traffic Obfuscation Technology for Smart Home2022 International Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing (IWCMC)10.1109/IWCMC55113.2022.9825227(997-1002)Online publication date: 30-May-2022
  • (2022)A Mapping Study on Privacy Attacks in Big Data and IoT2022 13th International Conference on Information and Communication Technology Convergence (ICTC)10.1109/ICTC55196.2022.9952824(1158-1163)Online publication date: 19-Oct-2022
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