Analyzing Traffic Characteristics of Instant Messaging Applications on Android Smartphones
Zolboo Erdenebaatar, Riyad Alshammari, Nur Zincir-Heywood, Marwa A. Elsayed, Biswajit Nandy, Nabil Seddigh · 2023
Instant Messaging Applications (IMAs), such as WhatsApp and Messenger, have become one of the main communication tools for smartphone users. However, there is limited research analyzing the nature of encrypted network traffic produced by IMAs. In this paper, we employ a data driven approach using machine learning classification models to analyze and identify encrypted traffic from six different IMAs. Our results show that it is possible to distinguish the behaviour of different IMAs with high F1 scores.