Application identification through intelligent traffic classification
Subject Areas : ICT
1 - ITRC
Keywords: Encrypted traffic classification, Operational architectural framework, Statistical features, Application Identification, Machine learning,
Abstract :
Traffic classification and analysis is one of the big challenges in the field of data mining and machine learning, which plays an important role in providing security, quality assurance and network management. Today, a large amount of transmission traffic in the network is encrypted by secure communication protocols such as HTTPS. Encrypted traffic reduces the possibility of monitoring and detecting suspicious and malicious traffic in communication infrastructures (instead of increased security and privacy of the user) and its classification is a difficult task without decoding network communications, because the payload information is lost, and only the header information (which is encrypted too in new versions of network communication protocols such as TLS1.03) is accessible. Therefore, the old approaches of traffic analysis, such as various methods based on port and payload, have lost their efficiency, and new approaches based on artificial intelligence and machine learning are used in cryptographic traffic analysis. In this article, after reviewing the traffic analysis methods, an operational architectural framework for intelligent traffic analysis and classification has been designed. Then, an intelligent model for Traffic Classification and Application Identification is presented and evaluated using machine learning methods on Kaggle141. The obtained results show that the random forest model, in addition to high interpretability compared to deep learning methods, has been able to provide high accuracy in traffic classification compared to other machine learning methods. Finally, tips and suggestions about using machine learning methods in the operational field of traffic classification have been provided.
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