Spot Me if You Can: Uncovering Spoken Phrases in Encrypted VoIP Conversations

Wright, Charles V.; Ballard, Lucas; Coull, Scott E.; Monrose, Fabian; Masson, Gerald M.

doi:10.1109/sp.2008.21

Cited by 165 publications

(131 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…Recent research has demonstrated that traffic analysis can be used for a number of attacks: identification of web sites visited [3], [4], guesses at passwords typed [5], and recovery of phrases spoken over VoIP [6]. However, it was previously assumed that such attacks required access to one of the routers along the path of Alice's traffic.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Low-Cost Side Channel Remote Traffic Analysis Attack in Packet Networks

Kadloor

Gong

Kiyavash

et al. 2010

2010 IEEE International Conference on Communications

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Abstract-This paper presents a dangerous low-cost traffic analysis attack in packet-based networks, such as the Internet. The attack is mountable in any scenario where a shared routing resource exists among users. A real-world attack successfully compromised the privacy of a user without requiring significant resources in terms of access, memory, or computational power. The effectiveness of our attack is demonstrated in a scenario where the user's DSL router uses FCFS scheduling policy. Specifically, we show that by using a low-rate sequence of probes, a remote attacker can obtain significant traffic-timing and volume information about a particular user, just by observing the round trip time of the probes. We also observe that even when the scheduling policy is changed to round-robin, while the correlation reduces significantly, the attacker can still reliably deduce user's traffic pattern. Most of the router scheduling policies designed to date are evaluated mostly on the metrics of throughput, delay and fairness. Our work is aimed to demonstrate a need for considering an additional metric that quantifies the information leak between the individual traffic flows through the router.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Low-Cost Side Channel Remote Traffic Analysis Attack in Packet Networks

Kadloor

Gong

Kiyavash

et al. 2010

2010 IEEE International Conference on Communications

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“…Wright et al [5] propose to use the size of transmitted packets to determine whether a given phrase is spoken. By reducing speech to phonemes, the most basic speech unit, they are able, using HMMs, to reconstruct sentences using the sequence of packet lengths.…”

Section: A Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Experiments have shown that the approach proposed in [5] does not work with Skype traffic as the encoding of phoneme depends strongly on the surrounding sounds. Furthermore, the approaches proposed in [5] and [6] require the possession of a binary of the audio codec to create a match between the VBR output and the encrypted packet length.…”

Section: B Motivationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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On the Privacy of Encrypted Skype Communications

Dupasquier

Burschka

McLaughlin

et al. 2010

2010 IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference GLOBECOM 2010

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“…In particular, a knowledgeable and powerful censor could potentially defeat such measures by applying steganographic detection techniques [9], enumerating the location of decoy routers [10], and/or leveraging machine learning-based traffic analyzers to perform traffic classification (cf. [14][15][16]). …”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Censorship Resistance as a Side-Effect

Tan

Sherr

2014

Security Protocols XXII

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This position paper presents the following thought experiment: can we build communication protocols that (1) are sufficiently useful that they achieve widespread adoption as general-purpose communication mechanisms and (2) thwart censorship as a consequence of their design? We posit that a useful communication platform that is inherently resistant to traffic analysis, if widely adopted and used primarily for purposes not related to censorship circumvention, may be too politically and economically costly for a government to block.

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Spot Me if You Can: Uncovering Spoken Phrases in Encrypted VoIP Conversations

Cited by 165 publications

References 22 publications

Low-Cost Side Channel Remote Traffic Analysis Attack in Packet Networks

Low-Cost Side Channel Remote Traffic Analysis Attack in Packet Networks

On the Privacy of Encrypted Skype Communications

Censorship Resistance as a Side-Effect

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