Packet Representation Learning for Traffic Classification

Abstract

With the surging development of information technology, to provide a high quality of network services, there are increasing demands and challenges for network analysis. As all data on the Internet are encapsulated and transferred by network packets, packets are widely used for various network traffic analysis tasks, from application identification to intrusion detection. Considering the choice of features and how to represent them can greatly affect the performance of downstream tasks, it is critical to learn high-quality packet representations. In addition, existing packet-level works ignore packet representations but focus on trying to get good performance with independent analysis of different classification tasks. In the real world, although a packet may have different class labels for different tasks, the packet representation learned from one task can also help understand its complex packet patterns in other tasks, while existing works omit to leverage them.