A Heuristic Statistical Testing Based Approach for Encrypted Network Traffic Identification
Author | Niu W. |
Author | Zhuo Z. |
Author | Zhang X. |
Author | Du X. |
Author | Yang G. |
Author | Guizani M. |
Available date | 2020-04-09T12:27:31Z |
Publication Date | 2019 |
Publication Name | IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology |
Resource | Scopus |
ISSN | 189545 |
Abstract | In recent years, malware with strong concealment uses encrypted protocol to evade detection. Thus, encrypted traffic identification can help security analysts to be more effective in narrowing down those encrypted network traffic. Existing methods are protocol independent, such as statistical-based and machine-learning-based approaches. Statistical-based approaches, however, are confined to payload length and machine-learning-based approaches have a low recognition rate for encrypted traffic using undisclosed protocols. In this paper, we proposed a heuristic statistical testing (HST) approach that combines both statistics and machine learning and has been proved to alleviate their respective deficiencies. We manually selected four randomness tests to extract small payload features for machine learning to improve real-time performances. We also proposed a simple handshake skipping method called HST-R to increase the classification accuracy. We compared our approach with other identification approaches on a testing dataset consisting of traffic that uses two known, two undisclosed, and one custom cryptographic protocols. Experimental results showed that HST-R performs better than other traditional coding-based, entropy-based, and ML-based approaches. We also showed that our handshake skipping method could generalize better for unknown cryptographic protocols. Finally, we also conducted experimental comparisons among different classification algorithms. The results showed that C4.5, with our method, has the highest identification accuracy for secure sockets layer and secure shell traffic. |
Sponsor | Basic Research Programs of Sichuan Province, Science and Technology Foundation of State Grid Corporation of China, National Natural Science Foundation of China |
Language | en |
Publisher | Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc. |
Subject | Encrypted traffic identification handshake skipping machine learning protocol-independent statistical testing |
Type | Article |
Pagination | 3843-3853 |
Issue Number | 4 |
Volume Number | 68 |
Files in this item
Files | Size | Format | View |
---|---|---|---|
There are no files associated with this item. |
This item appears in the following Collection(s)
-
Computer Science & Engineering [2288 items ]