Traffic Privacy Study on Internet of Things - Smart Home Applications

Internet of Things devices have been widely adopted in many different applications in recent years, such as smart home applications. An adversary can capture the network traffic of IoT devices and analyze it to reveal user activities even if the traffic is encrypted. Therefore, traffic privacy is a major concern, especially in smart home applications. Current traffic shaping methods have many tunable variables that are difficult to optimize to balance bandwidth over- heads and latencies. In this paper, we study current traffic shaping algorithms in terms of computational requirements, bandwidth overhead, latency, and privacy protection based on captured traffic data from a mimic smart home network. A new traffic shaping method Dynamic Traffic Padding is proposed to balance bandwidth overheads and delays according to the type of devices and desired privacy.