VPN-Encrypted Network Traffic Classification Using a Time-Series Approach

Abstract

Network traffic classification provides value to organizations and Internet service providers (ISPs). The identification of applications or services from network traffic enables organizations to better manage their business, and ISPs to offer services to their users. Given the vast quantity of traffic flowing in and out of organizations, it is impractical to write manual signatures for traffic identification. The effectiveness of machine learning (ML) in the identification of applications or services from network traffic has been demonstrated. Even when network traffic is encrypted, ML algorithms achieve high accuracy in the task of traffic identification based on statistical information and the packets’ headers and payloads. However, existing approaches were shown to be ineffective for VPN-encrypted network traffic. In this study, we propose a novel time-series based approach for the identification of traffic/source applications on VPN-encrypted traffic. We also demonstrate the broad applicability of our proposed approach by evaluating its effectiveness on non-VPN traffic that is encrypted, and on IoT traffic.