Advanced Passive Operating System Fingerprinting Using Machine Learning and Deep Learning

Abstract

without whom my Ph.D. life in Oslo would not have been so much fun. I am deeply grateful for all the fun, jokes and sometimes serious academic conversations over our lunch and dinner times. You all have been the source of my laughter and positive energy ever since we became colleagues. I have had so much fun along the way and my sincere thanks to you all buddies. There are still other very good friends, families, and colleagues, too many to list here, who I have had the opportunity to discuss ideas about my Ph.D. research work over the years to which I owe a great debt of heartfelt gratitude.Last but not least, I would like to thank the two most important people in my life to whom this dissertation is dedicated: my brilliant and hard-working mother Amlisha Mehari Tesfeu; and my best friend Amha Tesfay Desta. Dear mom, your boundless support, unconditional love, courage, strength, resilience, constant source of encouragement in everything I do and your pro-education mentality is what has brought me this far, and I will forever be unbelievably grateful to you. For as long as I can remember, you have always believed in me and wholeheartedly encouraged and supported me to run after whatever it is that I passionately dream of pursuing in life. None of what I have achieved and all the miles I have traveled so far in my life would have been possible without you, mom. I owe everything I have ever achieved in my entire life to you, mom, and thank you for being my lifetime hero and my best friend.Amish, you are one of the most thoughtful, loyal, dignified, compassionate and generous souls with a golden heart I have ever come in my life and it makes me extremely happy to proudly call you a dear brother and absolutely my best friend for life. Your positive attitude, profound knowledge, and understanding about a simple and ethical life, your true brotherhood and friendship have deeply influenced my life to which I am extraordinarily grateful. Most importantly, Amishey, you are one of the very few people who never gave up on me, no matter what and the best lifelong friend who has always been by my side through good and bad times. Of all your encouraging SMS messages I have received during this journey of my Ph.D. career, "The more I see you being strong and organized, I thank God! Always be on the right page of life and be grateful to God for everything you have.", stood out for me. In every step of my journey, I will try my level best to remain as strong and organized as possible and make you and my mom proud. Amishey, both you and my mother are constant reminders in my life of what it means to live with integrity and professionalism every day and this is something I will never ever forget as long as I live. Thank you!

Passive Operating System Fingerprinting Revisited: Evaluation and Current Challenges

“…The datasets and the research works were published between 2018 and 2020 and should accurately represent current real-world network traffic as the datasets contain network flow capture from large-scale campus network including the OS labels from various OS detection techniques up to the minor OS version detail level. The datasets were recently used by Fan et al [53], Hagos et al [72,73], and Zhang et al [91] from different research groups, which indicates the usability of the dataset. Moreover, the usability of the datasets is supported by more the 500 downloads of the datasets.…”