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

Abstract

The automation of the home through Internet of Things (IoT) devices presents security challenges for protecting the safety and privacy of its inhabitants. In spite of standard wireless communication security protocols, an attacker inside the wireless communication range of the smart home can extract identifier and statistical information, such as the MAC address and packet lengths, from the encrypted wireless traffic of IoT devices to make inferences about the private activities of the user. In this paper, to prevent this breach on privacy in the wireless LAN, we accomplish the following three items. First, we demonstrate that performing traffic shaping simultaneously on the upload and download node is necessary; second, we demonstrate that traffic shaping by random packet generation is impracticable due to the excessive bandwidth requirement; third, we propose traffic shaping by variable padding durations to reduce the bandwidth requirement for injecting dummy traffic during periods of user activity and inactivity to decrease the confidence of the local attacker from identifying genuine user activity traffic. From our performance evaluation, we decreased the data generated on several WiFi and ZigBee-enabled IoT devices by over 15% by our proposal of variable padding durations compared to the conventional method of fixed padding durations at low attacker confidence.