Feature Engineering and Ensemble Learning-Based Classification of VPN and Non-VPN-Based Network Traffic over Temporal Features

Abstract

With the rapid advancement in technology, the constant emergence of new applications and services has resulted in a drastic increase in Internet traffic, making it increasingly challenging for network analysts to maintain network security and classify traffic, especially when encrypted or tunneled. To address this issue, the proposed strategy aims to distinguish between regular traffic and traffic tunneled through a virtual private network and characterize traffic from seven different applications. The proposed approach utilizes various ensemble machine learning techniques, which are efficient and accurate and consume minimal computational time for training and prediction compared to conventional machine and deep learning models. These models were applied for both the classification and characterization of network traffic, deriving efficient results. The extreme and light gradient boosting algorithms performed well in multiclass classification, while AdaBoost and Light GBM performed well in binary classification. However, when all the datasets were merged and categorized into two classes and various feature engineering methods were applied, the proposed system achieved an accuracy of more than 99%, with minimal error scores using light GBM with min�max scaling over stratified fivefold, thereby outperforming all existing approaches. This research highlights the efficiency and potential of the proposed model in detecting network traffic. � 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.