Adaptive Packet Padding Approach for Smart Home Networks: A Tradeoff Between Privacy and Performance

The presence of connected devices in homes introduces numerous threats to privacy via the analysis of the encrypted traffic these devices generate. Prior works have shown that traffic attributes such as packet size combined with machine learning techniques enable the inference of private information from Internet of Things users. One of the commonly used techniques to mitigate those privacy threats is traffic obfuscation, such as packet padding. Most padding mechanisms that were previously proposed statically select the number of bytes inserted in the packets, which incurs high overhead and ineffective privacy improvement. These static mechanisms are particularly unsuitable for networks whose traffic patterns are significantly dynamic, such as smart homes. This article proposes an adaptive packet padding approach based on software-defined networking (SDN) that adjusts the number of bytes inserted into packets in response to variations in the home network utilization. The proposed technique monitors the network to instruct a padding mechanism through a representational state transfer (REST) interface proposed in this article. This mechanism ensures that the length of packets generated by connected devices is modified. The evaluation includes four supervised learning mechanisms, random forest (RF), support vector machine (SVM), decision tree, and k-nearest neighbors (KNNs), to measure privacy improvement through the metrics accuracy, recall, and F1-score. Goodput, jitter, and packet loss induced by the proposal are also evaluated. Our proposal is shown to overcome the state-of-the-art solutions in privacy preservation with a significantly lower overhead. For instance, the accuracy of RF on identifying devices decreases from 96% to 4.96%.