CLA-BERT: A Hybrid Model for Accurate Encrypted Traffic Classification by Combining Packet and Byte-Level Features

Hong Huang, Yinghang Zhou () and Feng Jiang
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Hong Huang: School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sichuan University of Science and Engineering, Yibin 644000, China
Yinghang Zhou: School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sichuan University of Science and Engineering, Yibin 644000, China
Feng Jiang: School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin 150001, China

Mathematics, 2025, vol. 13, issue 6, 1-24

Abstract: Encrypted traffic classification is crucial for network security and management, enabling applications like QoS control and malware detection. However, the emergence of new encryption protocols, particularly TLS 1.3, poses challenges for traditional methods. To address this, we propose CLA-BERT, which integrates packet-level and byte-level features. Unlike existing methods, CLA-BERT efficiently fuses these features using a multi-head attention mechanism, enhancing accuracy and robustness. It leverages BERT for packet-level feature extraction, while CNN and BiLSTM capture local and global dependencies in byte-level features. Experimental results show that CLA-BERT is highly robust in small-sample scenarios, achieving F1 scores of 93.51%, 94.79%, 97.10%, 97.78%, and 98.09% under varying data sizes. Moreover, CLA-BERT demonstrates outstanding performance across three encrypted traffic classification tasks, attaining F1 scores of 99.02%, 99.49%, and 97.78% for VPN service classification, VPN application classification, and TLS 1.3 application classification, respectively. Notably, in TLS 1.3 classification, it surpasses state-of-the-art methods with a 0.47% improvement in F1 score. These results confirm CLA-bert’s effectiveness and generalization capability, making it well-suited for encrypted traffic classification.

Keywords: encrypted traffic classification; BERT; CNN; bilstm; multi-head attention (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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