2025/08/05 by Eun Sil Choi, Choi, Eun Hun, Jasleen Kaur +6
Computer Science · Social Sciences · #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting #Legal and Policy Issues #Network Security and Intrusion Detection #Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2508.03891
openalex publication_date 2025/08/05 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Accurately classifying the application types of network traffic using deep learning models has recently gained popularity. However, we find that these classifiers do not perform well on real-world traffic data due to the presence of non-application-specific generic background traffic originating from advertisements, analytics, shared APIs, and trackers. Unfortunately, state-of-the-art application classifiers overlook such traffic in curated datasets and only classify relevant application traffic. To address this issue, when we label and train using an additional class for background traffic, it leads to additional confusion between application and background traffic, as the latter is heterogeneous and encompasses all traffic that is not relevant to the application sessions. To avoid falsely classifying background traffic as one of the relevant application types, a reliable confidence measure is warranted, such that we can refrain from classifying uncertain samples. Therefore, we design a Gaussian Mixture Model-based classification framework that improves the indication of the deep learning classifier's confidence to allow more reliable classification.