The rapid adoption of Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.3 and emerging encrypted protocols such as QUIC has dramatically increased the proportion of encrypted network traffic, making traditional Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) techniques infeasible. As a ...
The rapid adoption of Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.3 and emerging encrypted protocols such as QUIC has dramatically increased the proportion of encrypted network traffic, making traditional Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) techniques infeasible. As a result, classification approaches relying on non-payload information—particularly header-level statistical features and flow-level dynamics—have become essential. FlowSpectrum (FS), which transforms flow characteristics into a compact visual-quantitative representation, has shown competitive performance in encrypted traffic classification tasks.
However, the original FS formulation exhibits structural instability and high sensitivity to variance in packet sequences, primarily due to flow-level randomness and protocol-induced variability. These factors often cause overlapping spectral patterns between classes and lead to unstable similarity calculations, ultimately degrading the performance of downstream deep learning models.
To address these limitations, this study proposes the Mean FlowSpectrum (Mean FS) technique, an average-based correction method that integrates a mean-derived adjustment term into the similarity computation. By reflecting the central tendency of each class spectrum, the proposed correction stabilizes the global flow distribution and alleviates the effects of noisy or isolated spectral values. We incorporate the Mean FS representation into Semi-AE and Semi-2DCAE architectures for encrypted traffic classification.
Experimental evaluations on three datasets—ISCX-VPN2016, USTC-TFC2016, and a real-world TLS 1.3/SSH dataset—demonstrate that the Mean FS-enhanced models significantly outperform conventional FS in terms of Accuracy and F1-score. Notably, in practical environments such as our TLS 1.3/SSH dataset, Mean FS achieved superior performance even compared to YaTC, a state-of-the-art self-supervised representation-learning model. These results confirm that the proposed Mean FS technique effectively resolves structural weaknesses in FlowSpectrum and provides a more robust foundation for encrypted traffic classification in modern network environments.