Volume 12, Number 06, March 2022

SSL/TLS Encrypted Traffic Application Layer Protocol and Service Classification

  Authors

Kunhao Li, Bo Lang, Hongyu Liu and Shaojie Chen, State Key Laboratory of Software Development Environment, Beijing, China

  Abstract

Network traffic protocols and service classification are the foundations of network quality of service (QoS) and security technologies, which have attracted increasing attention in recent years. At present, encryption technologies, such as SSL/TLS, are widely used in network transmission, so traditional traffic classification technologies cannot analyze encrypted packet payload. This paper first proposes a two-level application layer protocol classification model that combines packets and sessions information to address this problem. The first level extracts packet features, such as entropy and randomness of ciphertext, and then classifies the protocol. The second level regards the session as a unit and determines the final classification results by voting on the results of the first level. Many application layer protocols only correspond to one specific service, but HTTPS is used for many services. For the HTTPS service classification problem, we combine session features and packet features and establish a service identification model based on CNN-LSTM. We construct a dataset in a laboratory environment. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves 99.679% and 96.27% accuracy in SSL/TLS application layer protocol classification and HTTPS service classification, respectively. Thus, the service classification model performs better than other existing methods.

  Keywords

SSL/TLS, HTTPS, Protocol Classification, Service Classification.