Separating Flows in Encrypted Tunnel Traffic

Abstract

In many scenarios like wireless Internet access or encrypted VPN tunnels, encryption is performed on a per-packet basis. While this encryption approach effectively protects the confidentiality of the transmitted payload, it leaves traffic patterns involving inter-arrival times and packet lengths observable, e.g., to eavesdroppers on the air interface. It is a widespread belief that by only observing interleaved packets of different parallel flows, analysis and classification of the corresponding traffic by an eavesdropper is very difficult or close to impossible.

In this paper, we show that it is indeed possible to separate packets belonging to different flows purely from patterns observed in the interleaved packet sequence. We devise a novel deep recurrent neural network architecture that allows us to detect individual anomalous packets in a flow. Based on this anomaly detector, we develop an algorithm to find a separation into flows that minimizes the anomaly score indicated by our model. Our experimental results obtained with synthetically crafted flows and real-world network traces indicate that our approach is indeed able to separate flows successfully with high accuracy.

Being able to recover a flow’s packet sequence from multiple interleaved flows, we show with this paper that the common packet-level encryption might be insufficient in scenarios where high levels of privacy have to be achieved. On the defender’s side, our approach constitutes a valuable tool in encrypted traffic analysis, but also contributes a novel neural network architecture in the field of network intrusion detection in general.