Visible to the public Real-Time Encrypted Traffic Classification via Lightweight Neural Networks

TitleReal-Time Encrypted Traffic Classification via Lightweight Neural Networks
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2020
AuthorsCheng, J., He, R., Yuepeng, E., Wu, Y., You, J., Li, T.
Conference NameGLOBECOM 2020 - 2020 IEEE Global Communications Conference
Date Publisheddec
Keywords1D Convolutional Network, compositionality, cryptography, Deep Learning, Encrypted traffic classification, feature extraction, Hidden Markov models, Information Reuse and Security, Multi-head Attention Mechanism, pubcrawl, Real-time Systems, Resiliency, Task Analysis, Training
AbstractThe fast growth of encrypted traffic puts forward burning requirements on the efficiency of traffic classification. Although deep learning models perform well in the classification, they sacrifice the efficiency to obtain high-precision results. To reduce the resource and time consumption, a novel and lightweight model is proposed in this paper. Our design principle is to "maximize the reuse of thin modules". A thin module adopts the multi-head attention and the 1D convolutional network. Attributed to the one-step interaction of all packets and the parallelized computation of the multi-head attention mechanism, a key advantage of our model is that the number of parameters and running time are significantly reduced. In addition, the effectiveness and efficiency of 1D convolutional networks are proved in traffic classification. Besides, the proposed model can work well in a real time manner, since only three consecutive packets of a flow are needed. To improve the stability of the model, the designed network is trained with the aid of ResNet, layer normalization and learning rate warmup. The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art works based on deep learning on two public datasets. The results show that our model has higher accuracy and running efficiency, while the number of parameters used is 1.8% of the 1D convolutional network and the training time halves.
DOI10.1109/GLOBECOM42002.2020.9322309
Citation Keycheng_real-time_2020