Enhanced Encrypted Traffic Classification Through Packet-Flow Dual Views

In the field of cybersecurity, encrypted traffic classification is of paramount importance, serving as a crucial technology for ensuring data privacy and defending against cyber attacks. Existing ETC (Encrypted Traffic Classification) methods commonly face three challenges in real-world Mobile Internet environments, particularly pertinent to the multimedia context: 1) singular entity traffic information, 2) fixed-size feature filters in learning models, and 3) reliance on traditional encryption protocols. To address these, we introduce the innovative Packet-Flow Dual Views (PFDV) framework. PFDV aims to push the performance boundaries of ETC tasks in multimedia traffic scenarios by examining encrypted payloads separately from the packet and flow views. More specifically, PFDV employs a dual attention framework, comprising both payload attention and gram attention, to accurately identify nuanced differences in network traffic. Such an approach underscores granular packet-level details while offering a comprehensive flow view with packet positional data, striving for an optimal balance in multimedia traffic analysis. PFDV demonstrated superior performance across diverse tasks, achieving accuracy rates and F1 scores significantly higher than competing methods, with results of up to 98.34% accuracy and 95.69 % F1 score in multimedia traffic classification. Furthermore, ablation studies demonstrate each component in PFDV contributes significantly to the overall enhancement of ETC performance in the model.