ANT-ET: An end-to-end multimodal framework for fine-grained encrypted traffic fingerprinting

The widespread use of encryption protocols and increasing privacy demands have significantly increased encrypted traffic, creating new challenges for network monitoring and threat detection. Current methods struggle with diverse scenarios and distinguish between subtle traffic patterns within webpages of the same application. To address these challenges, we introduce ANT-ET, an end-to-end multimodal framework designed for fine-grained encrypted webpage traffic fingerprinting. ANT-ET leverages a transformer to model payload semantics and constructs a traffic interaction graph to capture both temporal and spatial characteristics of packet interactions. Additionally, ANT-ET incorporates a gradient reversal layer to improve generalization by facilitating domain-invariant feature learning across related webpages. Experimental results demonstrate ANT-ET’s superior performance compared to various baseline models, which were evaluated using a proprietary encrypted webpage traffic dataset and three public datasets. Ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of different framework components, while sensitivity and complexity analyses further validate ANT-ET’s robustness and flexibility.