Multi-classification approaches for classifying mobile app traffic

摘要

The growing usage of smartphones in everyday life is deeply (and rapidly) changing the nature of traffic traversing home and enterprise networks, and the Internet. Different tools and middleboxes, such as performance enhancement proxies, network monitors and policy enforcement devices, base their functions on the knowledge of the applications generating the traffic. This requirement is tightly coupled to an accurate traffic classification, being exacerbated by the (daily) expanding set of apps and the moving-target nature of mobile traffic. On the top of that, the increasing adoption of encrypted protocols (such as TLS) makes classification even more challenging, defeating established approaches (e.g., Deep Packet Inspection).