Profiling and identification of P2P traffic

Abstract

Accurate identification of network applications is important for many network activities. The traditional port-based technique has become much less effective since many new applications no longer use well-known fixed port numbers. In this paper, we propose a novel profile-based approach to identifying traffic flows belonging to the target application. In contrast to the method used in previous studies, of classifying traffic based on statistics of individual flows, we build behavioral profiles of the target application, which describe dominant patterns in the application. Based on the behavior profiles, a two-level matching method is used to identify new traffic. We first determine whether a host participates in the target application by comparing its behavior with the profiles. Subsequently, we compare each flow of the host with those patterns in the application profiles to determine which flows belong to this application. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on-campus traffic traces. Our results show that one can identify popular P2P applications with very high accuracy.