Web Application Awareness using HTTP Host

Abstract

Today's network traffic has become extremely complex and diverse since the speed of network became faster and a variety of application services appear. Moreover, many applications appear and disappear fast and continuously. However, the current traffic classification system does not give much attention to this dynamic change of applications. In this paper, we propose an application awareness system in order to solve this problem. The application awareness system can provide the information, such as the usage trend of conventional applications and the emergence of new applications by recognizing the application name in a rapidly changing network environment. In order to recognize the application name, the Host field of HTTP protocol has been utilized. The proposed mechanism consists of two steps. First, the system generates the candidates of application name by extracting the domain name from the Host field in HTTP packet. Second, the administrator confirms the name afterward. The validity of the proposed system has been proved through the experiments in campus network.