arXiv AI By Mayan Sharma, Kriti Saini, Devansh Behl

The Split Protocol Decides the Result: Re-Evaluating Encrypted Traffic Classification

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The paper demonstrates that encrypted traffic classification accuracy can be dramatically inflated by the choice of data split protocol. Using the same model and code, macro‑F1 scores drop from 0.992 under a standard random split to 0.567 when flows from a single packet capture are kept on one side of the split, a gap of 0.426 that is statistically significant. The authors evaluate multiple split strategies on QUIC traffic, showing that server‑disjoint splitting harms performance while other splits are comparable, and provide a diagnostic based on single‑identifier probes to identify the appropriate split axis before training.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv AI.

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