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Netw."],"published-print":{"date-parts":[[2025,7,31]]},"abstract":"<jats:p>In response to the escalating prevalence of inference attacks on network traffic, traffic shaping emerges as a highly effective strategy to curb the leakage of user privacy information. Although many traffic shaping mechanisms have been proposed, their privacy-preserving performance has mostly been evaluated empirically or by focusing solely on inter-event traffic shaping methods, thereby neglecting intra-event information. In this work, we develop a general framework considering intra-event characteristics for quantifying privacy leakage. The proposed evaluation framework provides quantitative assessments of privacy risks and can guide the design and improvement of traffic-shaping mechanisms. Our theoretical results identify the limitation of existing approaches, namely, the absence of a flexible trade-off between privacy-preserving effectiveness and cost. This trade-off is critical for IoT applications, as devices are highly heterogeneous in terms of resources (i.e., bandwidth) and need to meet service-level objectives (e.g., latency). To achieve this design goal, we model the trade-off problem as multi-armed bandits and propose an online traffic-shaping algorithm named DPShaping. DPShaping has a proven privacy-preserving guarantee and supports flexible trade-offs between effectiveness and communication cost. We compare our approach with three representative algorithms. Experimental results show that compared with state-of-the-art schemes, DPShaping achieves lower attack accuracy (only 16.8%) and reduces bandwidth and delay.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1145\/3745783","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2025,6,25]],"date-time":"2025-06-25T07:39:31Z","timestamp":1750837171000},"page":"1-22","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1145\/crossmark-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["DPShaping: Balancing Privacy Guarantee and Communication Cost in IoT Traffic Shaping"],"prefix":"10.1145","volume":"21","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-2230-7412","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Sijia","family":"Zhang","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"University of Science and Technology of China","place":["Hefei, China"]}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-6611-2409","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Xiang","family":"Cui","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China","place":["Hefei, China"]}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-8492-3990","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Haohua","family":"Du","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Beihang University","place":["Beijing, China"]}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-4025-5580","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Shaoang","family":"Li","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China","place":["Hefei, China"]}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-3942-9977","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Yingqi","family":"Yu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China","place":["Hefei, China"]}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-3340-8585","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Jiahui","family":"Hou","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China","place":["Hefei, China"]}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-6070-6625","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Xiangyang","family":"Li","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China","place":["Hefei, China"]}]}],"member":"320","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2025,7,22]]},"reference":[{"key":"e_1_3_1_2_2","first-page":"253","volume-title":"Proceedings of the 9th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI\u201912)","author":"Alizadeh Mohammad","year":"2012","unstructured":"Mohammad Alizadeh, Abdul Kabbani, Tom Edsall, Balaji Prabhakar, Amin Vahdat, and Masato Yasuda. 2012. 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