BitMiner: Bits Mining in Internet Traffic Classification

Traditionally, signatures used for traffic classification are constructed at the byte-level. However, as more and more data-transfer formats of network protocols and applications are encoded at the bit-level, byte-level signatures are losing their effectiveness in traffic classification. In this poster, we creatively construct bit-level signatures by associating the bit-values with their bit-positions in each traffic flow. Furthermore, we present BitMiner, an automated traffic mining tool that can mine application signatures at the most fine-grained bit-level granularity. Our preliminary test on popular peer-to-peer (P2P) applications, e.g. Skype, Google Hangouts, PPTV, eMule, Xunlei and QQDownload, reveals that although they all have no byte-level signatures, there are significant bit-level signatures hidden in their traffic.