Abstract
With the popularity and development of mobile devices, the types and number of mobile applications are increasing, and people will perform different activities in the same application (e.g., refreshing the page, sending messages, browsing). Obtaining network traffic in real-time is an important foundation for network content supervision. Identifying application activity based on network traffic helps network managers understand user behaviors better and improve the quality of service. The widespread use of encrypted traffic in Mobile Applications presents a challenge to accurately identify application activities. Due to the low recognition speed of the existing application action recognition work for encrypted traffic, it is difficult to meet the real-time requirements. Therefore, we propose a fast application activity recognition method based on encrypted traffic. We extract the trend characteristics of the traffic generated by the application activity and use machine learning to identify the activity. The experimental results show that our method can identify user activities effectively. In addition, we have improved the existing method in real-time, and experiments show that our method is two orders of magnitude faster than the existing method when the recognition rate is similar to that of the existing methods.
Supported by organization x.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Alan, H.F., Kaur, J.: Can android applications be identified using only TCP/IP headers of their launch time traffic? In: Proceedings of the 9th ACM Conference on Security & Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks, pp. 61–66 (2016)
Ata, S., Iemura, Y., Nakamura, N., Oka, I.: Identification of user behavior from flow statistics. In: 2017 19th Asia-Pacific Network Operations and Management Symposium (APNOMS), pp. 42–47. IEEE (2017)
Conti, M., Mancini, L.V., Spolaor, R., Verde, N.V.: Can’t you hear me knocking: identification of user actions on android apps via traffic analysis. In: Proceedings of the 5th ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy, pp. 297–304 (2015)
Conti, M., Mancini, L.V., Spolaor, R., Verde, N.V.: Analyzing android encrypted network traffic to identify user actions. IEEE Trans. Inf. Forensics Secur. 11(1), 114–125 (2015)
Dai, S., Tongaonkar, A., Wang, X., Nucci, A., Song, D.: NetworkProfiler: towards automatic fingerprinting of android apps. In: 2013 Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM, pp. 809–817. IEEE (2013)
Korczyński, M., Duda, A.: Markov chain fingerprinting to classify encrypted traffic. In: IEEE INFOCOM 2014-IEEE Conference on Computer Communications, pp. 781–789. IEEE (2014)
Kulkarni, R.A.: Scrutinizing action performed by user on mobile app through network using machine learning techniques: a survey. In: 2018 2nd International Conference on Inventive Systems and Control (ICISC), pp. 860–863. IEEE (2018)
Park, K., Kim, H.: Encryption is not enough: inferring user activities on KakaoTalk with traffic analysis. In: Kim, H., Choi, D. (eds.) WISA 2015. LNCS, vol. 9503, pp. 254–265. Springer, Cham (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31875-2_21
Ranjan, G., Tongaonkar, A., Torres, R.: Approximate matching of persistent lexicon using search-engines for classifying mobile app traffic. In: IEEE INFOCOM 2016-The 35th Annual IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications, pp. 1–9. IEEE (2016)
Saltaformaggio, B., et al.: Eavesdropping on fine-grained user activities within smartphone apps over encrypted network traffic. In: 10th \(\{\)USENIX\(\}\) Workshop on Offensive Technologies (\(\{\)WOOT\(\}\) 16) (2016)
Shen, M., Wei, M., Zhu, L., Wang, M.: Classification of encrypted traffic with second-order Markov chains and application attribute bigrams. IEEE Trans. Inf. Forensics Secur. 12(8), 1830–1843 (2017)
Shen, M., Wei, M., Zhu, L., Wang, M., Li, F.: Certificate-aware encrypted traffic classification using second-order Markov chain. In: 2016 IEEE/ACM 24th International Symposium on Quality of Service (IWQoS), pp. 1–10. IEEE (2016)
Taylor, V.F., Spolaor, R., Conti, M., Martinovic, I.: AppScanner: automatic fingerprinting of smartphone apps from encrypted network traffic. In: 2016 IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS&P), pp. 439–454. IEEE (2016)
Taylor, V.F., Spolaor, R., Conti, M., Martinovic, I.: Robust smartphone app identification via encrypted network traffic analysis. IEEE Trans. Inf. Forensics Secur. 13(1), 63–78 (2017)
Wang, S., Yan, Q., Chen, Z., Yang, B., Zhao, C., Conti, M.: TextDroid: semantics-based detection of mobile malware using network flows. In: 2017 IEEE Conference on Computer Communications Workshops (INFOCOM WKSHPS), pp. 18–23. IEEE (2017)
Xu, Q., Erman, J., Gerber, A., Mao, Z., Pang, J., Venkataraman, S.: Identifying diverse usage behaviors of smartphone apps. In: Proceedings of the 2011 ACM SIGCOMM Conference on Internet Measurement Conference, pp. 329–344 (2011)
Xu, Q., et al.: Automatic generation of mobile app signatures from traffic observations. In: 2015 IEEE Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM), pp. 1481–1489. IEEE (2015)
Yao, H., Ranjan, G., Tongaonkar, A., Liao, Y., Mao, Z.M.: Samples: self adaptive mining of persistent lexical snippets for classifying mobile application traffic. In: Proceedings of the 21st Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking, pp. 439–451 (2015)
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 61772559, 61602167).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Liu, X., Zhang, S., Li, H., Wang, W. (2021). Fast Application Activity Recognition with Encrypted Traffic. In: Liu, Z., Wu, F., Das, S.K. (eds) Wireless Algorithms, Systems, and Applications. WASA 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12938. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86130-8_25
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86130-8_25
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-86129-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-86130-8
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)