Multi-Feature Fusion Based Approach for Classifying Encrypted Mobile Application Traffic

Qingya Yang, Peipei Fu, Junzheng Shi, Bingxu Wang, Zhen Li, Gang Xiong

Abstract: With rapid development of mobile Internet, a great number of mobile applications has emerged, presenting a great explosion in mobile Internet traffic. Therefore, accurate classification of application traffic is necessary to more effectively manage mobile Internet traffic. However, the encryption of mobile application traffic gradually eliminates traditional classification approaches based on specific signatures, greatly increasing the difficulty of the classification of mobile application traffic. Therefore, we propose a novel multi-feature fusion (MFF)- based approach to enhance the accuracy of mobile application traffic classification. We also extract packet length sequence, byte sequence, statistical feature, etc. Then, we perform weighted fusions of features based on Relief-F algorithm to achieve the best set of features. Finally, we use machine learning techniques for application classification. Compared to several other feature extraction methods, MFF achieves an excellent performance with an accuracy of 97.6% for 16 mobile applications and a F1-score of over 99% for VPN-nonVPN.