Ultimate Encrypted Traffic Feature Engineering: HTTPS Encrypted Traffic Classification Using Restored Application Data Unit Length
Zihan Chen, Guang Cheng, Dandan Niu, Yuyu Zhao, Yuyang Zhou, Shanqing Jiang · IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing · 2025
Over-the-top (OTT) applications mainly communicate through HTTPS, the most famous encryption protocol family on the Internet. The classification of HTTPS encrypted traffic can effectively obtain fine-grained OTT application information for network management and cyber security. As the most expressive feature, the side-channel length sequence is widely used by current research, especially the packet length sequence. However, these attempts ignored interferences from protocol piecewise decoupling and encryption covering, leading to poor performance. Based on the application layer feature engineering theory, we proposed a new metric called Application Data Unit (ADU) length to eliminate the interferences. However, ADU length cannot be obtained directly from packets as the TLS encryption protocol covers the entire application layer, which contains an intrusive and variable HTTP header. Hence, we designed a Length-Correction Multiple Regression Neural Network (LCMRNN) algorithm to restore the real ADU length sequences accurately. Exhaustive experiments in two scenarios of the real CERNET network show that no matter the HTTP-1.1 or HTTP2.0 protocol, the LC-MRNN model can achieve significantly accurate ADU length restoration. In classification, with the assistance of the LS-LSTM classifier, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods with about 4.2% improvement in F1-score (93.52%).