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Unexpected means of protocol inference

Published: 25 October 2006 Publication History

Abstract

Network managers are inevitably called upon to associate network traffic with particular applications. Indeed, this operation is critical for a wide range of management functions ranging from debugging and security to analytics and policy support. Traditionally, managers have relied on application adherence to a well established global port mapping: Web traffic on port 80, mail traffic on port 25 and so on. However, a range of factors - including firewall port blocking, tunneling, dynamic port allocation, and a bloom of new distributed applications - has weakened the value of this approach. We analyze three alternative mechanisms using statistical and structural content models for automatically identifying traffic that uses the same application-layer protocol, relying solely on flow content. In this manner, known applications may be identified regardless of port number, while traffic from one unknown application will be identified as distinct from another. We evaluate each mechanism's classification performance using real-world traffic traces from multiple sites.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    IMC '06: Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement
    October 2006
    356 pages
    ISBN:1595935614
    DOI:10.1145/1177080
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 25 October 2006

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    Author Tags

    1. application signatures
    2. network data mining
    3. protocol analysis
    4. relative entropy
    5. sequence analysis
    6. statistical content modeling
    7. traffic classification

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    IMC06: Internet Measurement Conference
    October 25 - 27, 2006
    Rio de Janeriro, Brazil

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    Cited By

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    • (2023)Moving-Target-Defense based Security Mechanisms: A System Management Perspective2023 15th International Conference on COMmunication Systems & NETworkS (COMSNETS)10.1109/COMSNETS56262.2023.10041246(13-18)Online publication date: 3-Jan-2023
    • (2023)A Feasible and Explainable Network Traffic Classifier Utilizing DistilBERTIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2023.329310511(70216-70237)Online publication date: 2023
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    • (2022)Network Traffic Content Identification Based on Time-Scale Signal ModelingIEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing10.1109/TDSC.2022.3186665(1-19)Online publication date: 2022
    • (2021)Identification of Private ICS Protocols Based on Raw TrafficSymmetry10.3390/sym1309174313:9(1743)Online publication date: 19-Sep-2021
    • (2021)Nominate of significant features for unknown internet traffic applications filtering based on a neural network algorithmInternational Journal of ADVANCED AND APPLIED SCIENCES10.21833/ijaas.2021.02.0158:2(106-116)Online publication date: Feb-2021
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