Header signature maintenance for Internet traffic identification

Int J Network Mgmt 2016; 1–15 Summary Various traffic identification methods have been proposed with the focus on application‐level traffic analysis. Header signature–based identification using the 3‐tuple (Internet Protocol address, port number, and L4 protocol) within a packet header has garnered a lot of attention because it overcomes the limitations faced by the payload‐based method, such as encryption, privacy concerns, and computational overhead. However, header signature–based identification does have a significant flaw in that the volume of header signatures increases rapidly over time as a number of applications emerge, evolve, and vanish. In this article, we propose an efficient method for header signature maintenance. Our approach automatically constructs header signatures for traffic identification and only retains the most significant signatures in the signature repository to save memory space and to improve matching speed. For the signature maintenance, we define a new metric, the so‐called signature weight, that reflects its potential ability to identify traffic. Signature weight is periodically calculated and updated to adapt to the changes of network environment. We prove the feasibility of the proposed method by developing a prototype system and deploying it in a real operational network. Finally, we prove the superiority of our signature maintenance method through comparison analysis against other existing methods on the basis of various evaluation metrics.