PPTP: Privacy-Preserving Traffic Padding in Web-Based Applications

Web-based applications are gaining popularity as they require less client-side resources, and are easier to deliver and maintain. On the other hand, web applications also pose new security and privacy challenges. In particular, recent research revealed that many high profile web applications might cause sensitive user inputs to be leaked from encrypted traffic due to side-channel attacks exploiting unique patterns in packet sizes and timing. Moreover, existing solutions, such as random padding and packet-size rounding, were shown to incur prohibitive overhead while still failing to guarantee sufficient privacy protection. In this paper, we first observe an interesting similarity between this privacy-preserving traffic padding (PPTP) issue and another well studied problem, privacy-preserving data publishing (PPDP). Based on such a similarity, we present a formal PPTP model encompassing the privacy requirements, padding costs, and padding methods. We then formulate PPTP problems under different application scenarios, analyze their complexity, and design efficient heuristic algorithms. Finally, we confirm the effectiveness and efficiency of our algorithms by comparing them to existing solutions through experiments using real-world web applications.