Bandwidth Efficient IoT Traffic Shaping Technique for Protecting Smart Home Privacy from Data Breaches in Wireless LAN

摘要

The automation of the home through Internet of Things(IoT) devices presents security challenges for protecting the safety and privacyof its inhabitants. In spite of standard wireless communication securityprotocols, an attacker inside the wireless communication range of the smarthome can extract identifier and statistical information, such as the MAC addressand packet lengths, from the encrypted wireless traffic of IoT devicesto make inferences about the private activities of the user. In this paper,to prevent this breach on privacy in the wireless LAN, we accomplish thefollowing three items. First, we demonstrate that performing traffic shapingsimultaneously on the upload and download node is necessary; second, wedemonstrate that traffic shaping by random packet generation is impracticabledue to the excessive bandwidth requirement; third, we propose trafficshaping by variable padding durations to reduce the bandwidth requirementfor injecting dummy traffic during periods of user activity and inactivity todecrease the confidence of the local attacker from identifying genuine useractivity traffic. From our performance evaluation, we decreased the datagenerated on severalWiFi and ZigBee-enabled IoT devices by over 15% byour proposal of variable padding durations compared to the conventionalmethod of fixed padding durations at low attacker confidence.