Open-Source Framework for Encrypted Internet and Malicious Traffic Classification

TL;DR

This paper introduces OSF-EIMTC, an open-source framework that standardizes the process of encrypted internet traffic classification using ML and DL models, enhancing reproducibility and comparability in research.

Contribution

The paper presents a comprehensive, open-source framework for traffic classification that integrates datasets, feature extraction, and model evaluation, addressing the lack of standardization.

Findings

Framework facilitates repeatable research

Enables accurate comparison of models and features

Supports multiple datasets and evaluation scenarios

Abstract

Internet traffic classification plays a key role in network visibility, Quality of Services (QoS), intrusion detection, Quality of Experience (QoE) and traffic-trend analyses. In order to improve privacy, integrity, confidentiality, and protocol obfuscation, the current traffic is based on encryption protocols, e.g., SSL/TLS. With the increased use of Machine-Learning (ML) and Deep-Learning (DL) models in the literature, comparison between different models and methods has become cumbersome and difficult due to a lack of a standardized framework. In this paper, we propose an open-source framework, named OSF-EIMTC, which can provide the full pipeline of the learning process. From the well-known datasets to extracting new and well-known features, it provides implementations of well-known ML and DL models (from the traffic classification literature) as well as evaluations. Such a framework can facilitate research in traffic classification domains, so that it will be more repeatable, reproducible, easier to execute, and will allow a more accurate comparison of well-known and novel features and models. As part of our framework evaluation, we demonstrate a variety of cases where the framework can be of use, utilizing multiple datasets, models, and feature sets. We show analyses of publicly available datasets and invite the community to participate in our open challenges using the OSF-EIMTC.