A1 Refereed original research article in a scientific journal
PrivBox: Privacy-Preserving Deep Packet Inspection With Dual Double-Masking Obfuscated Rule Generation
Authors: Wu, Pengfei; Ning, Jianting; Huang, Xinyi; Chen, Rongmao; Zhang, Kai; Liang, Kaitai
Publisher: IEEE COMPUTER SOC
Publication year: 2025
Journal: IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing
Volume: 22
Issue: 5
First page : 4954
Last page: 4970
ISSN: 1545-5971
eISSN: 1941-0018
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/TDSC.2025.3557423
Publication's open availability at the time of reporting: No Open Access
Publication channel's open availability : Partially Open Access publication channel
Web address : https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10948341
Abstract
Many network middleboxes have been deployed to perform deep packet inspection (DPI) over packet payloads. However, such middleboxes cannot accomplish their tasks when the traffic is encrypted. BlindBox (SIGCOMM 2015) provided the first solution for performing DPI over encrypted traffic. To improve its efficiency, a later proposal PrivDPI (CCS 2019) introduced a practical technique to generate encrypted rules. However, a recent proposal P2DPI (ASIACCS 2021) showed that the rule generator in PrivDPI can comprise the user's privacy. In this article, we present a new attack on P2DPI and show that the privacy of its endpoints can still be compromised by the rule generator. We comprehensively analyze the vulnerability of prior studies and present PrivBox, a new DPI system that achieves the same privacy guarantee as BlindBox while maintaining practical efficiency. This is based on a new technique called dual double-masking obfuscated rule generation. For a ruleset of 3,000, PrivBox achieves connection establishment time on the endpoint side comparable to PrivDPI and supports up to 4,672 token encryptions per second, which is sufficient for a number of real-world applications. Overall, our experiment demonstrates that PrivBox is practical and well-suited for short, frequently established sessions, especially when token repeating is common.
Many network middleboxes have been deployed to perform deep packet inspection (DPI) over packet payloads. However, such middleboxes cannot accomplish their tasks when the traffic is encrypted. BlindBox (SIGCOMM 2015) provided the first solution for performing DPI over encrypted traffic. To improve its efficiency, a later proposal PrivDPI (CCS 2019) introduced a practical technique to generate encrypted rules. However, a recent proposal P2DPI (ASIACCS 2021) showed that the rule generator in PrivDPI can comprise the user's privacy. In this article, we present a new attack on P2DPI and show that the privacy of its endpoints can still be compromised by the rule generator. We comprehensively analyze the vulnerability of prior studies and present PrivBox, a new DPI system that achieves the same privacy guarantee as BlindBox while maintaining practical efficiency. This is based on a new technique called dual double-masking obfuscated rule generation. For a ruleset of 3,000, PrivBox achieves connection establishment time on the endpoint side comparable to PrivDPI and supports up to 4,672 token encryptions per second, which is sufficient for a number of real-world applications. Overall, our experiment demonstrates that PrivBox is practical and well-suited for short, frequently established sessions, especially when token repeating is common.
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