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Recently, much attention has been devoted to the development of generative network traces and their potential use in supplementing real-world data for a variety of data-driven networking tasks. Yet, the utility of existing synthetic traffic approaches are limited by their low fidelity: low feature granularity, insufficient adherence to task constraints, and subpar class coverage. As effective network tasks are increasingly reliant on raw packet captures, we advocate for a paradigm shift from coarse-grained to fine-grained traffic generation compliant to constraints. We explore this path employing controllable diffusion-based methods. Our preliminary results suggest its effectiveness in generating realistic and fine-grained network traces that mirror the complexity and variety of real network traffic required for accurate service recognition. We further outline the challenges and opportunities of this approach, and discuss a research agenda towards text-to-traffic synthesis. 

Operational networks commonly rely on machine learning models for many tasks, including detecting anomalies, inferring application performance, and forecasting demand. Yet, model accuracy can degrade due to concept drift, whereby the relationship between the features and the target to be predicted changes. Mitigating concept drift is an essential part of operationalizing machine learning models in general, but is of particular importance in networking's highly dynamic deployment environments. In this paper, we first characterize concept drift in a large cellular network for a major metropolitan area in the United States. We find that concept drift occurs across many important key performance indicators (KPIs), independently of the model, training set size, and time interval---thus necessitating practical approaches to detect, explain, and mitigate it. We then show that frequent model retraining with newly available data is not sufficient to mitigate concept drift, and can even degrade model accuracy further. Finally, we develop a new methodology for concept drift mitigation, Local Error Approximation of Features (LEAF). LEAF works by detecting drift; explaining the features and time intervals that contribute the most to drift; and mitigates it using forgetting and over-sampling. We evaluate LEAF against industry-standard mitigation approaches (notably, periodic retraining) with more than four years of cellular KPI data. Our initial tests with a major cellular provider in the US show that LEAF consistently outperforms periodic and triggered retraining on complex, real-world data while reducing costly retraining operations.

 

One-Class Support Vector Machines (OCSVMs) are a set of common approaches for novelty detection due to their flexibility in fitting complex nonlinear boundaries between normal and novel data. Novelty detection is important in the Internet of Things (“IoT”) due to the potential threats that IoT devices can present, and OCSVMs often perform well in these environments due to the variety of devices, traffic patterns, and anomalies that IoT devices present. Unfortunately, conventional OCSVMs can introduce prohibitive memory and computational overhead in detection. This work designs, implements, and evaluates an efficient OCSVM for such practical settings. We extend Nyström and (Gaussian) Sketching approaches to OCSVM, combining these methods with clustering and Gaussian mixture models to achieve 15-30x speedup in prediction time and 30-40x reduction in memory requirements without sacrificing detection accuracy. Here, the very nature of IoT devices is crucial: they tend to admit few modes of normal operation, allowing for efficient pattern compression. 

Users face various privacy risks in smart homes, yet there are limited ways for them to learn about the details of such risks, such as the data practices of smart home devices and their data flow. In this paper, we present Privacy Plumber, a system that enables a user to inspect and explore the privacy "leaks" in their home using an augmented reality tool. Privacy Plumber allows the user to learn and understand the volume of data leaving the home and how that data may affect a user's privacy -- in the same physical context as the devices in question, because we visualize the privacy leaks with augmented reality. Privacy Plumber uses ARP spoofing to gather aggregate network traffic information and presents it through an overlay on top of the device in an smartphone app. The increased transparency aims to help the user make privacy decisions and mend potential privacy leaks, such as instruct Privacy Plumber on what devices to block, on what schedule (i.e., turn off Alexa when sleeping), etc. Our initial user study with six participants demonstrates participants' increased awareness of privacy leaks in smart devices, which further contributes to their privacy decisions (e.g., which devices to block). 

Many Internet of Things devices have voice user interfaces. One of the most popular voice user interfaces is Amazon’s Alexa, which supports more than 50,000 third-party applications (“skills”). We study how Alexa’s integration of these skills may confuse users. Our survey of 237 participants found that users do not understand that skills are often operated by third parties, that they often confuse third-party skills with native Alexa functions, and that they are unaware of the functions that the native Alexa system supports. Surprisingly, users who interact with Alexa more frequently are more likely to conclude that a third-party skill is a native Alexa function. The potential for misunderstanding creates new security and privacy risks: attackers can develop third-party skills that operate without users’ knowledge or masquerade as native Alexa functions. To mitigate this threat, we make design recommendations to help users better distinguish native functionality and third-party skills, including audio and visual indicators of native and third-party contexts, as well as a consistent design standard to help users learn what functions are and are not possible on Alexa. 

Network management often relies on machine learning to make predictions about performance and security from network traffic. Often, the representation of the traffic is as important as the choice of the model. The features that the model relies on, and the representation of those features, ultimately determine model accuracy, as well as where and whether the model can be deployed in practice. Thus, the design and evaluation of these models ultimately requires understanding not only model accuracy but also the systems costs associated with deploying the model in an operational network. Towards this goal, this paper develops a new framework and system that enables a joint evaluation of both the conventional notions of machine learning performance (e.g., model accuracy) and the systems-level costs of different representations of network traffic. We highlight these two dimensions for two practical network management tasks, video streaming quality inference and malware detection, to demonstrate the importance of exploring different representations to find the appropriate operating point. We demonstrate the benefit of exploring a range of representations of network traffic and present Traffic Refinery, a proof-of-concept implementation that both monitors network traffic at 10~Gbps and transforms traffic in real time to produce a variety of feature representations for machine learning. Traffic Refinery both highlights this design space and makes it possible to explore different representations for learning, balancing systems costs related to feature extraction and model training against model accuracy.