Skip to main content

Temporal Analysis of Privacy Enhancing Technology Traffic Using Deep Learning

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Security and Privacy in Social Networks and Big Data (SocialSec 2023)

Abstract

Tor is an open-source communications software program that enables anonymity on the Internet. Tor’s ability to hide its users’ identity means it is incredibly popular with criminals, who use it to keep their online activities secret from law enforcement authorities. Tor uses layers of encryption to hide its users’ data on the Web. However, most encryption techniques implemented till date do not provide full anonymity. We can use classification algorithms based on machine learning and deep learning to extract information about the users from network traffic. In this paper, we show that by performing a temporal analysis of Tor network traffic flowing between the user node and guard node, one can classify the Tor network traffic into various application types such as browsing, chat, email, P2P, FTP, audio, video, VoIP, and file-transfer. We apply many standard and popular machine learning and deep learning algorithms to categorize traffic by application and achieved an accuracy of 95.75% for Random Forest which outperforms the best work done till date on the ISCXTor2016 dataset.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  1. Lashkari, A.H., Draper-Gil, G., Mamun, M.S.I., Ghorbani, A.A.: Characterization of tor traffic using time-based features. In: ICISSP, pp. 253–262 (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Dingledine, R., Mathewson, N., Syverson, P.: Tor: the second-generation onion router. Technical report, Naval Research Lab Washington DC (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Back, A., Möller, U., Stiglic, A.: Traffic analysis attacks and trade-offs in anonymity providing systems. In: International Workshop on Information Hiding, pp. 245–257 (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Draper-Gil, G., Lashkari, A.H., Mamun, M.S.I., Ghorbani, A.A.: Characterization of encrypted and VPN traffic using time-related. In: Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy (ICISSP), pp. 407–414 (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Lal, T.N., Chapelle, O., Weston, J., Elisseeff, A.: Embedded methods. In: Guyon, I., Nikravesh, M., Gunn, S., Zadeh, L.A. (eds.) Feature Extraction, pp. 137–165. Springer, Heidelberg (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-35488-8_6

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  6. Gurunarayanan, A., Agrawal, A., Bhatia, A., Vishwakarma, D.K.: Improving the performance of machine learning algorithms for tor detection. In: 2021 International Conference on Information Networking (ICOIN), pp. 439–444 (2021)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Lamping, U., Warnicke, E.: Wireshark user’s guide. Interface 4(6), 1 (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Klevinsky, T.J., Laliberte, S., Gupta, A.: Hack IT: Security Through Penetration Testing. Addison Wesley Professional, Boston (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Fischetti T.: Data Analysis with R. Packt Publishing Ltd. (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Duch, W.: Filter methods. In: Guyon, I., Nikravesh, M., Gunn, S., Zadeh, L.A. (eds.) Feature Extraction, pp. 89–117. Springer, Heidelberg (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-35488-8_4

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  11. Guyon, I., Elisseeff, A.: An introduction to variable and feature selection. J. Mach. Learn. Res. 3(Mar), 1157–1182 (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Yang, J.B., Ong, C.J.: An effective feature selection method via mutual information estimation. IEEE Trans. Syst. Man Cybern. Part B (Cybern.) 42(6), 1550–1559 (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Maldonado, S., Weber, R.: A wrapper method for feature selection using support vector machines. Inf. Sci. 179(13), 2208–2217 (2009)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Goodfelow, I., Bengio, Y., Courville, A.: Deep Learning. MIT Press, Cambridge (2016)

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  15. Bjorck, J., Gomes, C., Selman, B., Weinberger, K.Q.: Understanding batch normalization. arXiv preprint arXiv:180602375 (2018)

  16. Dubey, A.K., Jain, V.: Comparative study of convolution neural network’s relu and leaky-relu activation functions. In: Mishra, S., Sood, Y.R., Tomar, A. (eds.) Applications of Computing, Automation and Wireless Systems in Electrical Engineering. LNEE, vol. 553, pp. 873–880. Springer, Singapore (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6772-4_76

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  17. How to grid search hyperparameters for deep learning models in python with Keras. https://machinelearningmastery.com/grid-search-hyperparameters-deep-learning-models-python-keras. Accessed 10 Oct 2022

  18. Chawla, N.V., Bowyer, K.W., Hall, L.O., Kegelmeyer, W.P.: Smote: synthetic minority oversampling technique. J. Artif. Intell. Res. 1, 321–357 (2002)

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  19. Xu, J., Wang, J., Qi, Q., Sun, H., He, B.: Deep neural networks for application awareness in sdnbased network. In: 28th International Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processing (MLSP), pp. 1–6. IEEE (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  20. Sarkar, D., Vinod, P., Yerima, S.Y.: Detection of tor traffic using deep learning. In: IEEE/ACS 17th International Conference on Computer Systems and Applications (AICCSA), pp. 1–8. IEEE (2020)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Niyati Baliyan .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Kumari, M., Ghosh, M., Baliyan, N. (2023). Temporal Analysis of Privacy Enhancing Technology Traffic Using Deep Learning. In: Arief, B., Monreale, A., Sirivianos, M., Li, S. (eds) Security and Privacy in Social Networks and Big Data. SocialSec 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14097. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-5177-2_14

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-5177-2_14

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore

  • Print ISBN: 978-981-99-5176-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-981-99-5177-2

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics