VoIP Traffic Detection in Tunneled and Anonymous Networks Using Deep Learning

Abstract

Network management is facing a great challenge to analyze and identify encrypted network traffic with specific applications and protocols. A significant number of network users applying different encryption techniques to network applications and services to hide the true nature of the network communication. These challenges attract the network community to improve network security and enhance network service quality. Network managers need novel techniques to cope with the failure and shortcomings of the port-based and payload-based classification methods of encrypted network traffic due to emergent security technologies. Mainly, the famous network hopping mechanisms used to make network traffic unknown and anonymous are VPN (virtual private network) and TOR (Onion Router). This paper presents a novel scheme to unveil encrypted network traffic and easily identify the tunneled and anonymous network traffic. The proposed identification scheme uses the highly desirable deep learning techniques to easily and efficiently identify the anonymous network traffic and extract the Voice over IP (VoIP) and Non VoIP ones within encrypted traffic flows. Finally, the captured traffic has been classified into four different categories, i-e., VPN VoIP, VPN Non-VoIP, TOR VoIP, and TOR Non-VoIP. The experimental results show that our identification engine is extremely robust to VPN and TOR network traffic.

Keywords

• Encrypted network traffic
• onion router network
• virtual private network
• VoIP
• anonymous network traffic
• convolutional neural network