A Large-Scale Benchmark and Risk Assessment of Traffic Analysis Attacks on Cloud LLM Services
cs.CR, cs.AI, cs.LG
Submitted: 2026-09-25
Updated: 2026-09-25
Comments: 11 pages, 9 figures, and 4 tables
Code: https://github.com/IQSeC-Lab/AI-Traffic-Analysis
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: Cloud-based Large language model (LLM) services create a network-level traffic side channel that can expose model, prompt, and task behavior despite encryption.
Terminology
Abstract
Cloud-based Large language model (LLM) services create a network-level traffic side channel that can expose model, prompt, and task behavior despite encryption. From packet sizes, directions, timing, and burst structure alone, a passive local observer can infer the serving model, the user's prompt category, and the task executed by a collaborative multi-agent system. Yet current evidence is fragmented across separate datasets and settings, limiting reproducibility and comparison. We present, to our knowledge, the first unified measurement study and public benchmark of encrypted LLM traffic across both user--LLM and multi-agent executions. The large-scale benchmark contains 60,000 user--LLM interactions across 10 models and 6 prompt categories, plus 2,838 multi-agent executions covering 10 task categories and two coordination topologies. Using only encrypted packet metadata, we assess the risk of traffic analysis attack by characterizing traffic signatures, identifying the features most associated with leakage, and testing robustness under prompt reformulation, decoding-temperature changes, larger candidate model sets, and partial traffic observation. Model fingerprinting achieves 97.7% balanced accuracy, prompt-category fingerprinting reaches 76.7% mean accuracy, and multi-agent task fingerprinting achieves up to 90.7% accuracy. Prompt reformulation weakens but does not remove model-specific leakage, and task fingerprints remain detectable even from a single agent's traffic.
Sources
- LLMs Have Rhythm: Fingerprinting Large Language Models Using Inter-Token Times and Network Traffic Analysis
- Remote Timing Attacks on Efficient Language Model Inference
- Whisper Leak: a side-channel attack on Large Language Models
- Exposing LLM User Privacy via Traffic Fingerprint Analysis: A Study of Privacy Risks in LLM Agent Interactions
- A Measurement of Genuine Tor Traces for Realistic Website Fingerprinting
- Holistic Evaluation of Language Models
- Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding
- RouterBench: A Benchmark for Multi-LLM Routing System
- LLMRouterBench: A Massive Benchmark and Unified Framework for LLM Routing
- NetEcho: From Real-World Streaming Side-Channels to Full LLM Conversation Recovery
- PersonaFingerprint: Measuring Persona Inference on Modern Websites with LLM-Driven Browsing
- TeamBench: Evaluating Agent Coordination under Enforced Role Separation
- DeepResearch Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Deep Research Agents
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