Studies on Inspecting Encrypted Data: Trends and Challenges

Abstract

According to Google’s transparency report, 99% of the pages loaded on the Chrome browser are over HTTPS. Encrypting the data traffic becomes almost the default requirement for not only secret data transmission but also users’ privacy. However, encrypting data traffic makes us face a new threat. Particularly, conventional middlebox systems such as network intrusion detection systems and other network monitoring systems cannot effectively detect malicious activities over encrypted traffic. Due to this, building middlebox systems that can monitor the encrypted traffic become an actively researched topic. Many different middlebox systems that are based on different techniques are introduced, recently. In this paper, we present the trends and challenges of deep packet inspection (DPI) over encrypted data. Particularly, we triage them into non privacy-preserving techniques and privacy-preserving techniques. Then, we explain which inspection techniques they are based on and compared their properties. Moreover, we provide the challenge that those techniques have for future work. © 2023, Innovative Information Science and Technology Research Group. All rights reserved.