Flow-based Service Type Identification using Deep Learning

Date

2021-07-26

Department

Program

Citation of Original Publication

Elsaadawy, Mona et al.; Flow-based Service Type Identification using Deep Learning; 2021 IEEE 7th International Conference on Network Softwarization (NetSoft), 26 July, 2021; https://doi.org/10.1109/NetSoft51509.2021.9492663

Rights

This item is likely protected under Title 17 of the U.S. Copyright Law. Unless on a Creative Commons license, for uses protected by Copyright Law, contact the copyright holder or the author.
© 2021 IEEE.  Personal use of this material is permitted.  Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works

Subjects

Abstract

Automatic identification of the service type used by network flows (e.g., HTTP and MySQL) is an essential part of many cloud management and monitoring tasks for quality of service, security monitoring, resource allocation, etc. Several studies have adapted deep learning models for accurate service type identification of network traffic. These models vary in how the message flow data is used and what datasets are considered. There are no published guidelines on selecting the best approach for automating the service identification process. In this paper, we opt to fill such a technical gap and provide a detailed study of the trade-offs of different deep-learning based approaches for service type identification of network traffic. Towards this end, we generate flow-based datasets for a wide range of service types that are commonly deployed in the cloud. We consider two different deep learning models that have shown promising results in this context, and show their performance for both payload- and header-based datasets, considering fundamental parameters such as dynamic service port configuration, flow direction and the packet order in the flow stream.