Safeguarding User-Centric Privacy in Smart Homes

Internet of Things (IoT) devices have been increasingly deployed in smart homes to automatically monitor and control their environments. Unfortunately, extensive recent research has shown that on-path external adversaries can infer and further fingerprint people’s sensitive private information by analyzing IoT network traffic traces. In addition, most recent approaches that aim to defend against these malicious IoT traffic analytics cannot adequately protect user privacy with reasonable traffic overhead. In particular, these approaches often did not consider practical traffic reshaping limitations, user daily routine permitting, and user privacy protection preference in their design. To address these issues, we design a new low-cost, open source user-centric defense system—PrivacyGuard—that enables people to regain the privacy leakage control of their IoT devices while still permitting sophisticated IoT data analytics that is necessary for smart home automation. In essence, our approach employs intelligent deep convolutional generative adversarial network assisted IoT device traffic signature learning, long short-term memory based artificial traffic signature injection, and partial traffic reshaping to obfuscate private information that can be observed in IoT device traffic traces. We evaluate PrivacyGuard using IoT network traffic traces of 31 IoT devices from five smart homes and buildings. We find that PrivacyGuard can effectively prevent a wide range of state-of-the-art adversarial machine learning and deep learning based user in-home activity inference and fingerprinting attacks and help users achieve the balance between their IoT data utility and privacy preserving.