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alaswad2021encrypted

Ahmad Alaswad, "Encrypted Traffic Detection: Beyond The Port-number Era," Master's Thesis, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), TU Berlin (TUB), September 2021. (Advisor: Hossein Doroud; Referees: Falko Dressler and Thomas Sikora)

Abstract

The adoption of encryption is increasing rapidly in online communications. Encryption methods are widely used in popular apps to secure communications and preserve users' privacy. Also, cyberattackers on the networks utilize encryption to conceal their presence and activities. However, encryption introduces obstacles for applications and tools that use Deep Packet Inspection (IDP) techniques for improving the network functionality and applying network security supervision. Hence, early detection of encrypted traffic is required to reduce the overhead on the network and allow finer-grained traffic classification and processing. Port-number-based encryption identification is becoming less and less accurate due to the obfuscation techniques such as dynamic ports and port hoping. There are a variety of methods proposed by researchers for encrypted traffic identification and classification. Some of them rely on unencrypted parts of packets, e.g. DPI, others are machine learning methods that rely on flow statistics. Still, none of these techniques can be considered an optimum solution for detecting encrypted traffic generally. In this thesis, a new method for general encrypted traffic detection is proposed, by extracting features solely from the packets' payloads, using a set of Randomness Tests (RTs). The extracted features are used as input to an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) to perform the classification. Besides, along with the public data-set used for evaluation, a ground-truth generator is implemented for obtaining a data-set with more detailed labels. Furthermore, a comparison of the proposed method with two approaches is applied. In the first approach, a Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) mechanism is used that relies on the signatures of application protocols. The second approach is a machine learning method that relies on the features extracted from the statistical properties of the flow. In the comparison, three levels of granularity are considered: (i) only encryption detection, (ii) application protocol classification, and (iii) content classification.

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Ahmad Alaswad

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@phdthesis{alaswad2021encrypted,
    author = {Alaswad, Ahmad},
    title = {{Encrypted Traffic Detection: Beyond The Port-number Era}},
    advisor = {Doroud, Hossein},
    institution = {School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS)},
    location = {Berlin, Germany},
    month = {9},
    referee = {Dressler, Falko and Sikora, Thomas},
    school = {TU Berlin (TUB)},
    type = {Master's Thesis},
    year = {2021},
   }
   
   

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