Service-Based Identification of Highly Coupled Mobile Applications

Abstract

Identifying mobile applications from network traffic is important for Internet service providers (ISPs) to manage their networks at a fine-grained level. However, the rise of public services has led to a gradual increase in service coupling among applications, making it more difficult to identify applications. Existing methods produce classification ambiguities when identifying highly coupled mobile applications, resulting in low application identification accuracy. In this paper, we propose a service-based method to quickly identify highly service coupling applications after the applications are launched. It can accurately identify highly coupled mobile applications based on the features of the services accessed by the applications. Experiments on a real network traffic dataset of highly coupled mobile applications verify that our method can identify applications within 25s after the mobile applications are launched, and the identification accuracy is over 99%.