Adaptive Traffic Camouflage: Causal and Resource-Aware Defense Against IoT Fingerprinting

Abstract

Encryption hides IoT payloads, but traffic shape can still reveal device identity through packet sizes, timing, direction, and packetization. We present Adaptive Traffic Camouflage, a causal, leakage-aware controller that characterizes traffic-shape leakage without runtime device labels and selects a budget-feasible transformation for the next traffic window from previous-window context. The controller chooses among padding, packet splitting, timing, and composite transformations, or leaves traffic unchanged when camouflage is unnecessary. We evaluate the design on CIC-IoT-2022, IoT Sentinel, and UNSW using classical and sequence-based fingerprinting models under clean-trained, defense-aware, and incremental-exposure settings, with fixed, random, and mean-bandwidth-matched baselines. Under the Balanced profile, camouflage reduces mean Macro-F1 by 13.2-23.3% relative to clean traffic with 4.88-7.47% average bandwidth overhead and at most 0.64 ms added latency. Under the larger Privacy profile, the reduction increases to 28.0-43.5%. Defense-aware training recovers much of the lost attacker performance on CIC-IoT-2022 and UNSW, while IoT Sentinel retains a substantial privacy gap. A non-causal same-window reference provides only modest additional benefit over previous-window control, and metadata-rich attackers remain effective outside the targeted traffic-shape surface. These results show that causal, resource-aware camouflage can reduce IoT traffic-shape fingerprintability under explicit communication constraints, while the persistence of protection depends on how readily the defended distribution can be learned.

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