Cited by 439Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-votingDigital and Cyber ForensicsPrivacy-Preserving Technologies in Data

Robust Smartphone App Identification via Encrypted Network Traffic Analysis

Open access
Taylor, Vincent F., Spolaor, Riccardo, Conti, Mauro, Martinovic, Ivan·2018·IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security

Abstract

The apps installed on a smartphone can reveal much information about a user, such as their medical conditions, sexual orientation, or religious beliefs. In addition, the presence or absence of particular apps on a smartphone can inform an adversary, who is intent on attacking the device. In this paper, we show that a passive eavesdropper can feasibly identify smartphone apps by fingerprinting the network traffic that they send. Although SSL/TLS hides the payload of packets, side-channel data, such as packet size and direction is still leaked from encrypted connections. We use machine learning techniques to identify smartphone apps from this side-channel data. In addition to merely fingerprinting and identifying smartphone apps, we investigate how app fingerprints change over time, across devices, and across different versions of apps. In addition, we introduce strategies that enable our app classification system to identify and mitigate the effect of ambiguous traffic, i.e., traffic in common among apps, such as advertisement traffic. We fully implemented a framework to fingerprint apps and ran a thorough set of experiments to assess its performance. We fingerprinted 110 of the most popular apps in the Google Play Store and were able to identify them six months later with up to 96% accuracy. Additionally, we show that app fingerprints persist to varying extents across devices and app versions.

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Crossref · 10.1109/tifs.2017.2737970

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  • Statistical-feature-based encrypted traffic classification methods rely on expert-designed features that are hard to design generically and have limited generalization ability.

    “These methods highly rely on expert-designed features and have limited generalization ability.”

    From ET-BERT: A Contextualized Datagram Representation with Pre-training Transformers for Encrypted Traffic Classification (2022) · cites this paper as [36]

    The Classifier section describes a classification method built from specified statistical features, supporting the point that it relies on designed features. The evaluation reports reduced accuracy when both device and app version change (Effect of a Different Device and Different App Versions), but also finds resilience across time and smaller effects from changing devices. The paper does not say that such features are hard to design generically or establish limited generalization as a general property of statistical-feature-based methods; page numbers were not available in our copy. (LLM, conf=0.83)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

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Research works printed but not linked: 2

  1. T. Stöber, M. Frank, J. Schmitt, and I. Martinovic, "Who do you sync you are?" in Proceedings of the sixth ACM conference on Security and privacy in wireless and mobile networks -WiSec '13. New York, New York, USA: ACM Press, Apr. 2013, p. 7. [Online]. Available: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2462096.2462099
  2. M. Conti, L. V. Mancini, R. Spolaor, and N. V. Verde, "Can't you hear me knocking: Identification of user actions on android apps via traffic analysis," ACM CODASPY, 2015.

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Authors
Taylor, V. F., Spolaor, R., Conti, M., & Martinovic, I.
Affiliations
  • University of Oxford (GB)
  • University of Padua (IT)
Venue
IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security
Published
2018-01
Volume
13
Issue
1
Pages
63-78
ISSN
  • 1556-6013 (ISSN-L)
  • 1556-6021
OpenAlex
W2609737443
Cited by
439
References
30
Citations by year
2026: 47 · 2025: 69 · 2024: 63 · 2023: 55 · 2022: 60 · 2021: 45 · 2020: 41 · 2019: 39 · 2018: 18 · 2017: 1 · 2016: 1
FWCI
16.15
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (publishedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • Padua Research Archive (University of Padova) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Digital and Cyber Forensics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Privacy-Preserving Technologies in Data
Keywords
encrypted traffic analysis, packet size, SSL/TLS, passive eavesdropping, privacy leakage

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