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AN-Net: an Anti-Noise Network for Anonymous Traffic Classification

Published: 13 May 2024 Publication History

Abstract

Anonymous networks employ a triple proxy to transmit packets to enhance user privacy, causing traffic packets from all applications and web services to form a unified flow. The traditional approach of applying flow-level encrypted traffic classification methods to anonymous traffic (i.e., treating consecutive packets as a single flow) is hindered by irrelevant packet noise. Moreover, fluctuations in the network environment can introduce per-packet attribute noise and discrepancies between training and test data. How to extract robust patterns from consecutive packets replete with noise remains a key challenge. In this paper, we propose the Anti-Noise Network (AN-Net) to construct robust short-term representations for a single modality, effectively countering irrelevant packet noise. We also incorporate an enhanced multi-modal fusion approach to combat per-packet attribute noise. AN-Net achieves state-of-the-art performance across two anonymous traffic classification tasks and one VPN traffic classification task, notably elevating the F1 score of SJTU-AN21 to 94.39% (6.24%↑). Our code and dataset are available on https://github.com/SJTU-dxw/AN-Net.

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cover image ACM Conferences
WWW '24: Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2024
May 2024
4826 pages
ISBN:9798400701719
DOI:10.1145/3589334
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 13 May 2024

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Author Tags

  1. anonymous traffic classification
  2. irrelevant packet noise
  3. multi-modal fusion
  4. per-packet attribute noise
  5. short-term representation

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  • Research-article

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  • SJTU-QI'ANXIN Joint Lab of Information System Security

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WWW '24
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WWW '24: The ACM Web Conference 2024
May 13 - 17, 2024
Singapore, Singapore

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