DLET-Classifier: A Dynamic and Lightweight Method for Encrypted Traffic Classification
Jiayong Wu, Weina Niu, Fushan Wei, Shaofeng Li, Shiping Huang, Jiacheng Gong, Xiaosong Zhang · IEEE Internet of Things Journal · 2025
In recent years, encrypted traffic has become a critical means of ensuring user information security. However, the widespread adoption of encrypted traffic also introduces new challenges, such as enabling attackers to conceal malicious activities within encrypted channels. Consequently, accurate encrypted traffic classification is crucial for strengthening network security defenses. However, encrypted traffic classification methods often employing complex model structures and feature extraction techniques, while neglecting efficiency and latency, which makes them difficult to apply in low-resource scenarios with slow CPU computation speed, limited memory, and a scarce number of training samples. To address these issues, we propose the Dynamic and Lightweight Encrypted Traffic Classifier (DLET-Classifier), which uses the depthwise separable convolutional neural network and the channel attention mechanism to extract features from encrypted traffic. It efficiently captures byte-level features and the relationships between packets for effective classification. To enable the model to update rapidly and adapt to the ever-changing real-world network environment, we propose the Multi2One algorithm. This algorithm first updates the base model, an ensemble of multiple binary classifiers. Then, we use the knowledge distillation technique to transfer knowledge from the base model to a lightweight model. This process allows for model updates and extensions. The results of the multi-class classification comparison experiment show that among all the compared methods, the DLET-Classifier is the model with the smallest number of parameters and the highest throughput, while also achieving excellent classification accuracy. Incremental expansion experiments demonstrate that the Multi2One algorithm enables fast knowledge updates and extensions for the lightweight model (LWG) while maintaining its classification accuracy above 96%, making our method adapt to complex network environments.