
Over the last few years, the adoption of encryption in network traffic has been constantly increasing. The percentage of encrypted communications worldwide is estimated to exceed 90%. Although network encryption protocols mainly aim to secure and protect users' online activities and communications, they have been exploited by malicious entities that hide their presence in the network. It was estimated that in 2022, more than 85% of the malware used encrypted communication channels. In this work, we examine state-of-the-art fingerprinting techniques and extend a machine learning pipeline for effective and practical server classification. Specifically, we actively contact servers to initiate communication over the TLS protocol and through exhaustive requests, we extract communication metadata. We investigate which features favor an effective classification, following state-of-the-art approaches. Our extended pipeline can indicate whether a server is malicious or not with 91% precision and 95% recall, while it can specify the botnet family with 99% precision and 99% recall. This work was supported by the projects GREEN.DAT.AI, SENTINEL and SecOPERA, funded by the European Commission under Grant Agreements No. 101070416, No. 101021659, and No. 101070599,respectively.
| selected citations These citations are derived from selected sources. This is an alternative to the "Influence" indicator, which also reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically). | 5 | |
| popularity This indicator reflects the "current" impact/attention (the "hype") of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network. | Top 10% | |
| influence This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically). | Average | |
| impulse This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network. | Top 10% |
