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Main Authors: Zhao, Di, Jiang, Bo, Liu, Song, Cui, Susu, Shen, Meng, Han, Dongqi, Guan, Xingmao, Lu, Zhigang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.19482
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author Zhao, Di
Jiang, Bo
Liu, Song
Cui, Susu
Shen, Meng
Han, Dongqi
Guan, Xingmao
Lu, Zhigang
author_facet Zhao, Di
Jiang, Bo
Liu, Song
Cui, Susu
Shen, Meng
Han, Dongqi
Guan, Xingmao
Lu, Zhigang
contents The increasing demand for privacy protection and security considerations leads to a significant rise in the proportion of encrypted network traffic. Since traffic content becomes unrecognizable after encryption, accurate analysis is challenging, making it difficult to classify applications and detect attacks. Deep learning is currently the predominant approach for encrypted traffic classification through feature analysis. However, these methods face limitations due to their high dependence on labeled data and difficulties in detecting attack variants. First, their performance is highly sensitive to data quality, where the highcost manual labeling process and dataset imbalance significantly degrade results. Second, the rapid evolution of attack patterns makes it challenging for models to identify new types of attacks. To tackle these challenges, we present GBC, a generative model based on pre-training for encrypted traffic comprehension. Since traditional tokenization methods are primarily designed for natural language, we propose a protocol-aware tokenization approach for encrypted traffic that improves model comprehension of fields specific to network traffic. In addition, GBC employs pretraining to learn general representations from extensive unlabeled traffic data. Through prompt learning, it effectively adapts to various downstream tasks, enabling both high-quality traffic generation and effective detection. Evaluations across multiple datasets demonstrate that GBC achieves superior results in both traffic classification and generation tasks, resulting in a 5% improvement in F1 score compared to state-of-the-art methods for classification tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_19482
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
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spellingShingle Language of Network: A Generative Pre-trained Model for Encrypted Traffic Comprehension
Zhao, Di
Jiang, Bo
Liu, Song
Cui, Susu
Shen, Meng
Han, Dongqi
Guan, Xingmao
Lu, Zhigang
Cryptography and Security
The increasing demand for privacy protection and security considerations leads to a significant rise in the proportion of encrypted network traffic. Since traffic content becomes unrecognizable after encryption, accurate analysis is challenging, making it difficult to classify applications and detect attacks. Deep learning is currently the predominant approach for encrypted traffic classification through feature analysis. However, these methods face limitations due to their high dependence on labeled data and difficulties in detecting attack variants. First, their performance is highly sensitive to data quality, where the highcost manual labeling process and dataset imbalance significantly degrade results. Second, the rapid evolution of attack patterns makes it challenging for models to identify new types of attacks. To tackle these challenges, we present GBC, a generative model based on pre-training for encrypted traffic comprehension. Since traditional tokenization methods are primarily designed for natural language, we propose a protocol-aware tokenization approach for encrypted traffic that improves model comprehension of fields specific to network traffic. In addition, GBC employs pretraining to learn general representations from extensive unlabeled traffic data. Through prompt learning, it effectively adapts to various downstream tasks, enabling both high-quality traffic generation and effective detection. Evaluations across multiple datasets demonstrate that GBC achieves superior results in both traffic classification and generation tasks, resulting in a 5% improvement in F1 score compared to state-of-the-art methods for classification tasks.
title Language of Network: A Generative Pre-trained Model for Encrypted Traffic Comprehension
topic Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.19482