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Home ยป Language Identification of Encrypted VoIP Traffic: Alejandra y Roberto or Alice and Bob?
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Language Identification of Encrypted VoIP Traffic: Alejandra y Roberto or Alice and Bob?

Abstract: 

Voice over IP (VoIP) has become a popular protocol for making phone calls over the Internet. Due to the potential transit of sensitive conversations over untrusted network infrastructure, it is well understood that the contents of a VoIP session should be encrypted. However, we demonstrate that current cryptographic techniques do not provide adequate protection when the underlying audio is encoded using bandwidth-saving Variable Bit Rate (VBR) coders. Explicitly, we use the length of encrypted VoIP packets to tackle the challenging task of identifying the language of the conversation. Our empirical analysis of 2,066 native speakers of 21 different languages shows that a substantial amount of information can be discerned from encrypted VoIP traffic. For instance, our 21-way classifier achieves 66% accuracy, almost a 14-fold improvement over random guessing. For 14 of the 21 languages, the accuracy is greater than 90%. We achieve an overall binary classification (e.g., "Is this a Spanish or English conversation?") rate of 86.6%. Our analysis highlights what we believe to be interesting new privacy issues in VoIP.

Charles V. Wright, Johns Hopkins University

Lucas Ballard, Johns Hopkins University

Fabian Monrose, Johns Hopkins University

Gerald M. Masson, Johns Hopkins University

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BibTeX
@inproceedings {268497,
author = {Charles V. Wright and Lucas Ballard and Fabian Monrose and Gerald M. Masson},
title = {Language Identification of Encrypted {VoIP} Traffic: Alejandra y Roberto or Alice and Bob?},
booktitle = {16th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 07)},
year = {2007},
address = {Boston, MA },
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/16th-usenix-security-symposium/language-identification-encrypted-voip-traffic-alejandra-y},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = aug,
}
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Paper: 
http://usenix.org/events/sec07/tech/full_papers/wright/wright.pdf
Paper (HTML): 
http://usenix.org/events/sec07/tech/full_papers/wright/wright_html/index.html
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