Unsupervised Dataset Cleaning Framework for Encrypted Traffic Classification

Abstract

Traffic classification, a technique for assigning network flows to predefined categories, has been widely deployed in enterprise and carrier networks. With the massive adoption of mobile devices, encryption is increasingly used in mobile applications to address privacy concerns. Consequently, traditional methods such as Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) fail to distinguish encrypted traffic. To tackle this challenge, Artificial Intelligence (AI), in particular Machine Learning (ML), has emerged as a promising solution for encrypted traffic classification. A crucial prerequisite for any ML-based approach is traffic data cleaning, which removes flows that are not useful for training (e.g., irrelevant protocols, background activity, control-plane messages, and long-lived sessions). Existing cleaning solutions depend on manual inspection of every captured packet, making the process both costly and time-consuming. In this poster, we present an unsupervised framework that automatically cleans encrypted mobile traffic. Evaluation on real-world datasets shows that our framework incurs only a 2%~2.5% reduction in classification accuracy compared with manual cleaning. These results demonstrate that our method offers an efficient and effective preprocessing step for ML-based encrypted traffic classification.