End-to-end encrypted traffic classification with one-dimensional convolution neural networks

TLDR

Traffic classification is essential for network management and cyberspace security, but the widespread use of encryption has made classifying encrypted traffic a major challenge for traditional methods. The paper proposes an end‑to‑end encrypted traffic classification method using one‑dimensional convolutional neural networks. The method integrates feature extraction, selection, and classification into a unified 1‑D CNN framework and is validated on the public ISCX VPN‑nonVPN traffic dataset. This first end‑to‑end approach to encrypted traffic classification achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance, outperforming prior methods on 11 of 12 metrics in four experiments on the ISCX dataset.

Abstract

Traffic classification plays an important and basic role in network management and cyberspace security. With the widespread use of encryption techniques in network applications, encrypted traffic has recently become a great challenge for the traditional traffic classification methods. In this paper we proposed an end-to-end encrypted traffic classification method with one-dimensional convolution neural networks. This method integrates feature extraction, feature selection and classifier into a unified end-to-end framework, intending to automatically learning nonlinear relationship between raw input and expected output. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time to apply an end-to-end method to the encrypted traffic classification domain. The method is validated with the public ISCX VPN-nonVPN traffic dataset. Among all of the four experiments, with the best traffic representation and the fine-tuned model, 11 of 12 evaluation metrics of the experiment results outperform the state-of-the-art method, which indicates the effectiveness of the proposed method.