Network traffic classification based on periodic behavior detection

Abstract

Even though encryption hides the content of communication from network monitoring and security systems, this paper shows a feasible way to retrieve useful information about the observed traffic. The paper deals with detection of periodic behavioral patterns of the communication that can be detected using time series created from network traffic by autocorrelation function and Lomb-Scargle periodogram. The revealed characteristics of the periodic behavior can be further exploited to recognize particular applications. We have experimented with the created dataset of 61 classes, and trained a machine learning classifier based on XGBoost that performed the best in our experiments, reaching 90% F1-score.