Enhanced Encrypted Traffic Analysis Leveraging Graph Neural Networks and Optimized Feature Dimensionality Reduction

Abstract

With the continuously growing requirement for encryption in network environments, web browsers are increasingly employing hypertext transfer protocol security. Despite the increase in encrypted malicious network traffic, the encryption itself limits the data accessible for analyzing such behavior. To mitigate this, several studies have examined encrypted network traffic by analyzing metadata and payload bytes. Recent studies have furthered this approach, utilizing graph neural networks to analyze the structural data patterns within malicious encrypted traffic. This study proposed an enhanced encrypted traffic analysis leveraging graph neural networks which can model the symmetric or asymmetric spatial relations between nodes in the traffic network and optimized feature dimensionality reduction. It classified malicious network traffic by leveraging key features, including the IP address, port, CipherSuite, MessageLen, and JA3 features within the transport-layer-security session data, and then analyzed the correlation between normal and malicious network traffic data. The proposed approach outperformed previous models in terms of efficiency, using fewer features while maintaining a high accuracy rate of 99.5%. This demonstrates its research value as it can classify malicious network traffic with a high accuracy based on fewer features.

Keywords

• encrypted traffic analysis (ETA)
• graph neural network (GNN)
• GraphSAGE
• network traffic classification
• metadata
• optimized feature dimensionality reduction