Crypto Talk at 28C3: Datamining for Hackers – Encrypted Traffic Mining, Day 1, 14:00, Saal 1

The first cryptography related talk at 28C3 is about data mining in encrypted data. One may assume, that encrypting your data with a good encryption scheme prevents other people from learning about it. However, this is not true, specially for network protocols, that often leak information, like who is communicating with who, and when how much data is transferred. An attacker can use these information to make assumptions about the content of the transmission.

From the abstract: Voice over IP (VoIP) has experienced a tremendous growth over the last few years and is now widely used among the population and for business purposes. The security of such VoIP systems is often assumed, creating a false sense of privacy. Stefan will present research into leakage of information from Skype, a widely used and protected VoIP application. Experiments have shown that isolated phonemes can be classified and given sentences identified. By using the dynamic time warping (DTW) algorithm, frequently used in speech processing, an accuracy of 60% can be reached. The results can be further improved by choosing specific training data and reach an accuracy of 83% under specific conditions.

I think this talk is interesting, because it can show you how much information can even be gathered from an encrypted data stream, just using some side information from the communication.

See the talk: Day 1, 14:00, Saal 1

Author: Erik Tews