Inspecting Traffic in Residential Networks with Opportunistically Outsourced Middleboxes

Shuwen Liu, Yu Liu, Craig A. Shue

Abstract: Home networks lack the powerful security tools and trained personnel available in enterprise networks. This complicates efforts to address security risks in residential settings. While prior efforts explore outsourcing network traffic to cloud or cloudlet services, such an approach exposes that network traffic to a third party, which introduces privacy risks, particularly where traffic is decrypted (e.g., using Transport Layer Security Inspection (TLSI)). To enable security screening locally, home networks could introduce new physical hardware, but the capital and deployment costs may impede deployment. In this work, we explore a system to leverage existing available devices, such as smartphones, tablets and laptops, already inside a home network to create a platform for traffic inspection. This software-based solution avoids new hardware deployment and allows decryption of traffic without risk of new third parties. Our investigation compares on-router inspection of traffic with an approach using that same router to direct traffic through smartphones in the local network. Our performance evaluation shows that smartphone middleboxes can substantially increase the throughput of communication from around 10 Mbps in the on-router case to around 90 Mbps when smartphones are used. This approach increases CPU usage at the router by around 15%, with a 20% CPU usage increase on a smartphone (with single core processing). The network packet latency increases by about 120 milliseconds.