Statistical Privacy for Streaming Traffic

Abstract

Machine learning empowers traffic-analysis attacks that breach users’ privacy from their encrypted traffic. Recent advances in deep learning drastically escalate such threats. One prominent example demonstrated recently is a traffic-analysis attack against video streaming by using convolutional neural networks. In this paper, we explore the adaption of techniques previously used in the domains of adversarial machine learning and differential privacy to mitigate the machine-learning-powered analysis of streaming traffic. Our findings are twofold. First, constructing adversarial samples effectively confounds an adversary with a predetermined classifier but is less effective when the adversary can adapt to the defense by using alternative classifiers or training the classifier with adversarial samples. Second, differential-privacy guarantees are very effective against such statistical-inference-based traffic analysis, while remaining agnostic to the machine learning classifiers used by the adversary. We propose two mechanisms for enforcing differential privacy for encrypted streaming traffic, and evaluate their security and utility. Our empirical implementation and evaluation suggest that the proposed statistical privacy approaches are promising solutions in the underlying scenarios.