Abstract

Fine-grained traffic analysis (FGTA), as an advanced form of traffic analysis (TA), aims to analyze network traffic to deduce fine-grained information on or above the application layer, such as application-layer activities, fine-grained user behaviors, or message content, even in the presence of traffic encryption or traffic obfuscation. Different from traditional TA, FGTA approaches are usually based on complicated processing pipelines or sophisticated data mining techniques such as deep learning or high-dimensional clustering, enabling them to discover subtle differences between different network traffic groups. Nowadays, with the increasingly complex Internet architecture, the increasingly frequent transmission of user data, and the widespread use of traffic encryption, FGTA is becoming an essential tool for both network administrators and attackers to gain different levels of visibility over the network. It plays a critical …

Date

February 25, 2025

Authors

Yebo Feng, Jun Li, Jelena Mirkovic, Cong Wu, Chong Wang, Hao Ren, Jiahua Xu, Yang Liu

Source

IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials

Publisher

IEEE