High-performance Network Traffic Classification Based on Graph Neural Network

Network traffic classification is crucial for network security and network management and is one of the most important network tasks. Current state-of-the-art traffic classifiers are based on deep learning models to automatically extract features from packet streams. Unfortunately, current approaches fail to effectively combine the structural information of traffic packets with the content features of the packets, resulting in limited classification accuracy. In this paper, we propose a graph neural network model for network traffic classification, which can well perceive the interaction feature of packets in traffic. Firstly, we design a graph structure for packets’ flows to hold the interaction information between packets, which embeds both packet contents and sequence relationships into a unified graph. Secondly, we propose a graph neural network framework for graph classification to automatically learn the structural features of the packets’ flows together with the packets’ features. Extensive evaluation results on real-world traffic data show that the proposed model improves the prediction accuracy of improves the prediction accuracy by 2% to 37% for malicious traffic classification.