A Survey on Analyzing Encrypted Network Traffic of Mobile Devices
This is an incremental survey that organizes existing research for researchers and practitioners working on mobile traffic analysis.
This paper proposes a framework to categorize research on analyzing encrypted network traffic from mobile devices, followed by an extensive review of state-of-the-art techniques aimed at classifying such traffic for purposes like user profiling and network optimization.
Over the years, use of smartphones has come to dominate several areas, improving our lives, offering us convenience, and reshaping our daily work circumstances. Beyond traditional use for communication, they are used for many peripheral tasks such as gaming, browsing, and shopping. A significant amount of traffic over the Internet belongs to the applications running over mobile devices. Applications encrypt their communication to ensure the privacy and security of the user's data. However, it has been found that the amount and nature of incoming and outgoing traffic to a mobile device could reveal a significant amount of information that can be used to identify the activities performed and to profile the user. To that end, researchers are trying to develop techniques to classify encrypted mobile traffic at different levels of granularity, with the objectives of performing mobile user profiling, network performance optimization, $etc.$ This paper proposes a framework to categorize the research works on analyzing encrypted network traffic related to mobile devices. After that, we provide an extensive review of state of the art based on the proposed framework.