Abstract
Attackers can eavesdrop and exploit user privacy by classifying traffic into different types of in-app service usage to identify user actions. WeChat is the largest social messaging platform, which is a popular application in China. When WeChat is shut down, it is unable to generate traffic; that is, traditional traffic. However, the traffic still can be generated by system. How to identify the message types within WeChat with traffic generated by a system instead of traditional traffic becomes a new challenge. To deal with this challenge, we designed a system to identify and analyze the traffic of the Apple Push Notification service (APNs) to identify the message types of WeChat. In detail, we designed a system to identify and analyze the traffic of the APNs. First, the system clusters the traffic based on the session and divides it into multiple bursts. Then, it extracts the features of each burst and sends these features to the learning-based classifier to extract APNs’s traffic from the background traffic. Finally, it uses a hash-based lookup table method to analyze message types from APNs traffic. Extensive evaluation results show that we can accurately identify the six message types of APN and WeChat. In addition, we propose two coping strategies for the method proposed in this article.
Highlights
WeChat is China’s largest social messaging platform with sending/receiving functions of voice messages, videos, pictures, text, red packet (WeChat red packet is referred to as “Lucky Money”or “Red Envelope”.), and fund transfers (WeChat fund transfer allows the transfer of funds between individual users) [1]
After identifying the Apple Push Notification service (APNs) traffic, another important step is to identify the message types of WeChat from the APNs traffic generated by indirect watchOS (iOS)
We first assumed that the early classification phase of the APNs is 100% accurate in order to focus on the classification of message types
Summary
WeChat is China’s largest social messaging platform with sending/receiving functions of voice messages, videos, pictures, text, red packet Users may prohibit the permissions of some sensitive applications from using cellular traffic and Wi-Fi functions when they perceive that the network environment is not secure Some applications, such as Skype, cannot work properly without using a proxy in China. In Android, WeChat uses a daemon process to communicate with the WeChat server, which is responsible for receiving WeChat messages It belongs to the traffic generated by WeChat, but when the user prohibits WeChat from using the traffic or prevents WeChat from running in the background, WeChat cannot receive the message. The application receives notifications from APNs and displays them on the iOS interface In another case, the user sets the system to disable the application from generating message notifications. We focused on identifying the types of messages in this study
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