[UCI-Calit2] Traffic Classification and User Profiling- TODAY

[Anna Lynn Spitzer]

Traffic Classification and User Profiling: A Novel Approach
A Networked Systems Distinguished Speaker Event


With Michalis Faloutsos, associate professor of computer science, UC Riverside

2-3 p.m.
Thursday, Feb. 7
Calit2 Room 3008

Who uses the network? What kind of applications do we see? Can we detect attacks and viruses? Can we detect when a user is under attack? Monitoring network traffic and detecting unwanted applications has become a challenging problem, since many applications obfuscate their traffic using unregistered port numbers or payload encryption. Apart from some notable exceptions, most traffic-monitoring tools use two types of approaches: (a) keeping traffic statistics such as packet sizes and inter-arrivals, flow counts, byte volumes, etc., or (b) analyzing packet content.

In this talk, we provide an overview of our work to answer the above questions. More specifically, we address the problems of traffic classification and host profiling.  We present a fundamentally different approach to classifying traffic flows according to the applications that generate them. In contrast to previous methods, our novel graph-based approach is based on observing and identifying patterns of host behavior at the transport layer and the network-wide behavior of the community of interacting nodes.

Faloutsos earned masters and doctorate degrees in computer science at the University of Toronto, Canada. His research interests include Internet protocols and measurements; routing, including QoS and multicasting; network topology models; ad hoc networks; scalable networking and distributed algorithms.

For more information, contact Athina Markopoulou at athina at uci.edu.