Dataset for Web Traffic Security Analysis

Patterns of network activity can reveal an abundance of information on the behaviour of an application. Research has shown that despite the widespread use of network encryption protocols such as TLS or SSH, network application confidentiality can often times be violated through network traffic pattern analysis. Achieving sound mitigation of these information leaks while maintaining network usage efficiency is still an ongoing research topic. The goal of the research conducted in this paper is to provide network security researchers with a dataset of captured network traffic from a popular SSL/TLS protected website, which we have chosen to be reddit.com, for the purpose of evaluating algorithms for attacking and defending against network based side-channel information leaks. Our dataset is represented as a graph describing a crawl through the website. Every path from the center of the graph to any other connected point represents a sequence of user interactions with the website. By following a directed path through the graph, researchers can obtain probable sequences of user interactions with a website and the associated patterns of network traffic which these interactions generate.