Title: Mobile traffic identification based on application's network signature

Authors: Xin Su; Dafang Zhang; Shuaifu Dai; Jianyu Zhang; Duanbin Wang

Addresses: College of Computer Science and Electronics Engineering, Hunan University, Changsha, China ' College of Computer Science and Electronics Engineering, Hunan University, Changsha, China ' National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team/Coordination Center of China, No. 3 Yumin Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing, China ' ChangAn Inc., No. 3 Yumin Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing, China ' ChangAn Inc., No. 3 Yumin Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing, China

Abstract: Network traffic of different mobile applications identification is a fundamental component in many areas, such as network management. Recent research cannot differentiate the common HTTP requests such as GET *.jpg from third party content provider. Hence, they cannot measure how much of the traffic is generated by a certain app. In this paper, we propose a new network signature for mobile apps to solve the common HTTP requests problem. If we discovered one HTTP request, other requests should be expected around it. Based on this observation, we extended the signature extraction from a single HTTP request into the HTTP request set generated by a user's one operation. We correlated the reference information in HTTP traffic and examined the content return by the server to form this set. With this signature, we can not only improve the recognition rate of the app's traffic, but also identify the flow size of the app.

Keywords: mobile applications; mobile traffic identification; network signature; HTTP flow; embedded systems; mobile apps; HTTP requests; network traffic.

DOI: 10.1504/IJES.2016.076115

International Journal of Embedded Systems, 2016 Vol.8 No.2/3, pp.217 - 227

Received: 25 Sep 2014
Accepted: 04 Nov 2014
Published online: 26 Apr 2016 *

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