MIRAGE: Mobile-app Traffic Capture and Ground-truth Creation

Network traffic analysis, i.e. the umbrella of procedures for distilling information from network traffic, represents the enabler for highly-valuable profiling information, other than being the workhorse for several key network management tasks. While it is currently being revolutionized in its nature by the rising share of traffic generated by mobile and hand-held devices, existing design solutions are mainly evaluated on private traffic traces, and only a few public datasets are available, thus clearly limiting repeatability and further advances on the topic. To this end, we have designed and implemented MIRAGE, a reproducible architecture for mobile-app traffic capture and ground-truth creation. The outcome of this system is MIRAGE-2019, a human-generated dataset for mobile traffic analysis (with associated ground-truth) having the goal of advancing the state-of-the-art in mobile app traffic analysis. MIRAGE-2019 is expected to be capitalized by the networking community for different tasks related to mobile traffic analysis.

网络流量分析（Network traffic analysis），即从网络流量中提取信息的各类流程的总称，不仅是多项关键网络管理任务的核心支撑工具，更是获取高价值画像信息的关键赋能手段。尽管当前移动与手持设备产生的流量占比持续攀升，正从本质上革新网络流量分析领域，但现有的设计方案大多仅基于私有流量轨迹开展评估，公开可用的数据集寥寥无几，这显然严重制约了该领域研究的可重复性与进一步发展。为此，我们设计并实现了MIRAGE，一款可复现的移动应用流量捕获与真实标签（ground-truth）构建架构。该系统的产出成果为MIRAGE-2019：一个由人工生成、附带真实标签的移动流量分析数据集，旨在推动移动应用流量分析领域的前沿技术水平提升。预计网络领域研究者可将MIRAGE-2019应用于与移动流量分析相关的各类研究任务。