2022/03/23 by Jordan Holland, Holland, Jordan, Paul Schmitt +5
Computer Science · Social Sciences · #Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting #Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI) #Privacy, Security, and Data Protection #Privacy-Preserving Technologies in Data #cs.CR #cs.NI
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2203.12410
14 Pages, 7 Table, 3 Figures, 7 Listings
arxiv created 2022/03/23 · openalex publication_date 2022/03/23 · arxiv updated 2022/03/24 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Analysis techniques are critical for gaining insight into network traffic given both the higher proportion of encrypted traffic and increasing data rates. Unfortunately, the domain of network traffic analysis suffers from a lack of standardization, leading to incomparable results and barriers to reproducibility. Unlike other disciplines, no standard dataset format exists, forcing researchers and practitioners to create bespoke analysis pipelines for each individual task. Without standardization researchers cannot compare "apples-to-apples", preventing us from knowing with certainty if a new technique represents a methodological advancement or if it simply benefits from a different interpretation of a given dataset. In this work, we examine irreproducibility that arises from the lack of standardization in network traffic analysis. First, we study the literature, highlighting evidence of irreproducible research based on different interpretations of popular public datasets. Next, we investigate the underlying issues that have lead to the status quo and prevent reproducible research. Third, we outline the standardization requirements that any solution aiming to fix reproducibility issues must address. We then introduce pcapML, an open source system which increases reproducibility of network traffic analysis research by enabling metadata information to be directly encoded into raw traffic captures in a generic manner. Finally, we use the standardization pcapML provides to create the pcapML benchmarks, an open source leaderboard website and repository built to track the progress of network traffic analysis methods.