Solution: Inspecting Traffic in Residential Networks with Opportunistically Outsourced Middleboxes

Anonymous

Keywords: residential networks, security, middleboxes

TL;DR: The paper explores mechanisms to enable existing devices in a home network to aid in traffic inspection.

Abstract:

Since they lack the powerful tools and personnel available in enterprise-grade security solution, home networks have particularly difficult network security challenges. While prior efforts outsource network traffic to cloud or cloudlet services, such measures redirect network traffic out of the home network, which grants a third-party access to see and profile traffic. This affects the privacy of that traffic. Further, if those tools need to apply Transport Layer Security (TLS) decryption to enhance their monitoring insight, the privacy risks to home users grows substantially. Alternatively, residents may introduce new physical hardware in their home networks, but doing so incurs greater capital costs that would impede deployment.

Our work explores a system to leverage existing available devices, such as smartphones, tablets and laptops, inside a home network to create a platform for traffic inspection. By using devices owned and operated by the same end-users, the system can peeking into TLS traffic and perform detailed inspection without introducing risks from third parties. By leveraging existing devices in a home network, we can implement our platform with no additional hardware costs. Our performance evaluation shows that such middleboxes can substantially increase the throughput of communication from around 10 Mbps to around 90 Mbps, while increasing CPU usage at the router by around 15%, with a 20% CPU usage increase on a smartphone (with single core processing), and with a latency increase of about 120 milliseconds to network packets.

Area: Networking

Type: Solution

Conflicts: WPI(university)

Potential Reviewers: Francis Yan, Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi, Junchen Jiang