User profiling using smartphone network traffic analysis

Abstract: The recent decade has witnessed phenomenal growth in communication technology. Development of user-friendly software platforms, such as Facebook, WhatsApp etc. have facilitated ease of communication and thereby people have started freely sharing messages and multimedia over the Internet. Further, there is a shift in trends with services being accessed from smartphones over personal computers. To protect the security and privacy of the smartphone users, most of the applications use encryption that encapsulates communications over the Internet. However, research has shown that the statistical information present in a traffic can be used to identify the application, and further, the activity performed by the user inside that application. In this paper, we extend the scope of analysis by proposing a learning framework to leverage application and activity data to profile smartphone users in terms of their gender, profession age group etc. This will greatly help the authoritative agencies to conduct their investigations related to national security and other purposes.