Robust Smartphone App Identification via Encrypted Network Traffic Analysis

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...