Automatic discovery of web servers hosting similar applications

Increasingly more popular cloud services have frequently many functional parts, which makes their structure rather complex yet its understanding improves network monitoring for security purposes, traffic routing, etc. Since the structure of third-party services is typically unknown, automated tools for its discovery are of great need. In this work, we propose such tool relying only on high-level statistics of servers' usage, such as volumes and times of interactions with the servers. Without looking into the communication contents, the method works for encrypted channels as well, which is experimentally demonstrated on Dropbox service and Windows Live platform.