Trustworthy Deep Learning for Encrypted Traffic Classification

Abstract Network traffic classification refers to the identification of collected network traffic data of various applications, which is widely used in research fields such as network resource allocation, traffic scheduling and intrusion detection systems. With the widespread application of encryption technology in the network, encrypted traffic classification has become a hot research topic. At present, most existing methods only focus on the accuracy of network traffic classification. Yet, few work studies the reliability of the classification model, which plays an important role in network regulation and network security. In this paper, we propose a novel traffic classification method based on trustworthy deep learning model, which can effectively improve the reliability of encrypted traffic classification models by correcting the confidence of model output. Specifically, we firstly perform data preprocessing on the original network traffic, and then adopt a ConvNet for feature learning and a ClassifyNet for traffic classification in the initial stage. At the same time, we utilize a trustworthy confidence criterion to design a ConfidNet trained according to the probability of the true class. The ConfidNet can provide a reliable confidence measure for the prediction of the classification model. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework through comprehensive experiments on two benchmark datasets ISCX VPN-nonVPN and USTC-TFC2016, and show that our method can improve the reliability of the classification model and has a good ability to identify misclassified samples compared with state-of-the-art methods.