FusionTC: Encrypted App Traffic Classification Using Decision-Level Multimodal Fusion Learning of Flow Sequence

Abstract

In recent years, an increasing number of mobile platforms and applications have adopted traffic encryption protocol technology to ensure privacy and security. Existing researches on encrypted traffic identification approaches often rely on a single-modal feature pattern (such as packet sequence and statistical features), which cannot fully represent the detail information of complex traffic features, and so their predictions are susceptible to anomalies. In order to improve the effect of classification on encrypted app traffic, we propose FusionTC, a novel app traffic classification framework based on feature fusion of flow sequence. FusionTC consists of two-level subclassifiers, which are used to perform decision-level fusion of multimodal features by an upgraded stacking method. The comprehensive capture and fusion of multimodal traffic details, coupled with the refined processing and segmentation of traffic, enables FusionTC to significantly promote classification accuracy and enhance robustness in challenging situations. Based on our self-built app traffic dataset, FusionTC improves the accuracy by at least 3.2% over the state-of-the-art approaches.