  The growing market for smart home IoT devices promises new conveniences for
consumers while presenting novel challenges for preserving privacy within the
home. Specifically, Internet service providers or neighborhood WiFi
eavesdroppers can measure Internet traffic rates from smart home devices and
infer consumers' private in-home behaviors. Here we propose four strategies
that device manufacturers and third parties can take to protect consumers from
side-channel traffic rate privacy threats: 1) blocking traffic, 2) concealing
DNS, 3) tunneling traffic, and 4) shaping and injecting traffic. We hope that
these strategies, and the implementation nuances we discuss, will provide a
foundation for the future development of privacy-sensitive smart homes.
