Or and even easier way: just have the drone fill up the stream with random data so that the data stream never goes "quiet" when the image is mostly unchanged.

No sacrificing video quality or freshness required.

So you compress the video to a smaller size, and then fill in the bandwidth you saved with random data?

Why compress at all? Wouldn't just having a pixel perfect stream solve the same issue and give better quality video?

> Why compress at all? Wouldn't just having a pixel perfect stream solve the same issue and give better quality video?

Because compression reduces the amount of data that needs to be transmitted, reducing network and battery usage, especially if the radio channel is congested.

Instead of filling the stream and having a constant stream size, you could just code the drone do add random bursts of data, making any prediction from the observer useless.

These are opposite things:

> Because compression reduces the amount of data that needs to be transmitted, reducing network and battery usage

> Instead of filling the stream and having a constant stream size, you could just code the drone do add random bursts of data

You cannot simultaneously reduce network bandwidth and also increase it. Of course padding with noise increases bandwidth, but it's silly to do that when you could instead be padding it with more bits relevant to the video stream.

The vulnerability here isn't inherent to video compression; it's that the compression rate (and therefore network packet rate) is variable (so as to minimize global size of a video stream). It would not be that difficult to modify an encoder to guarantee fixed bit rate over whatever time chunk you want (depending on how many frames is tolerable to buffer before sending out), then send out those chunks at regular intervals.

All that would do is increase the number of intervals that would need to be observed. Adding noise to a channel only reduces the bandwidth of the channel.

I could be wrong, but I don't know if that is true here. First, if the receiver is aware exactly what parts to ignore, and the transmission itself is not interfered with or altered, then it's not really noise as far as the channel is concerned. Second, the assumption here is that spurious packets would be sent when data is not being transmitted, so this principle probably wouldn't hold anyway because the "noise" is inversely correlated to the signal.

1. The receiver here is the person determining whether or not they are being spied on. Not the user of the drone.

2. In order to make the real spikes fit into your random pattern you'd need to be able to predict when they will happen.

You are forgetting that the user of the drone can set the transmission protocol beforehand, and thus is still an important part of the process.

Given that you have a channel between A and B and an eavesdropper C:

Transmission between A and B can be done by any of several obfuscatory protocols, where (for example) a certain flag sent by A tells B to ignore some component of the transmission, to do no error correction on that part, etc. That flag is sent when updates are sparse, and filler (which is to be ignored) is added by B. Without determining how to identify between filler and data, C sees no variations in traffic volume.

Overcoming real-time spikes is easy with this protocol. Just keep a buffer of a few seconds before you begin transmitting.

This approach is a common answer to any sort of traffic analysis. There's actually a Tor alternative that operates on this principle of constant traffic between nodes (traffic analysis is an effective attack versus Tor), but the name escapes me at the moment.

It takes more CPU and battery to compress the video than to leave it raw. So sending a lossless or semi lossless version of the video should theoretically work.

wireless transmission costs magnitude more then CPU cycles hence delta frames.

> Instead of filling the stream and having a constant stream size, you could just code the drone do add random bursts of data, making any prediction from the observer useless.

If it's actually random, wouldn't the average bitrate of "still scene + occasional random data" still be lower than "active scene + occasional random data"? Given enough samples, of course.

The average doesn't really matter. The researchers are looking for "steps" in data streamed caused by changes in the video. If you're adding random levels noise it will drown the signal that the researchers are looking for.

But you are still open to a timing attack, no?

The random noise becomes the background and unless it is a constant addition of noise (which wouldn't save any bandwidth, might as well use uncompressed stream) you could still time changes in the signal.

The 'solution' of adding random data to hide these "steps" is a common misunderstanding of the theory behind preventing bandwidth side-channel attacks. It'll probably work in practice as long as the amount of randomness relative to the delta is sufficiently large and the attacker only can only make a limited amount of samples.

It's very likely that the drone doesn't have enough bandwidth to send the raw video, so you need to compress.

You can't compress truly random data, though. I guess you'd have to sufficiently pad the stream with data that compresses to a constant bit rate.

All you have to do is pad after compressing.

It all looks the same post-encryption.

> No sacrificing video quality or freshness required.

Just drone battery life

Constant-bitrate codecs modes are what you want.

A constant bitrate video codec seems much simpler, IMO.

Indeed. However, it is a very good practical example of why encryption alone doesn't do much. (If the attacker can measure your data stream, they can make statistical assumptions and pull a lot of useful data out without breaking the encryption).

Yes, just like anything...but it comes with a trade off.