Hiya all, This is similar to some work being carried out by the WiMAX Forum at the moment. As for the forum, I'd be willing to provide anonymised output from our Ellacoya boxes. -- Leigh Mark Allman wrote:

Folks-

This is a bit off-topic, but I wanted to make folks aware of it and note that we'd love to hear some operational experience / opinion about this entire area of trying to figure out what app a given traffic flow involves. (Yes, I understand that at some level it doesn't matter.)

allman

IMRG Workshop on Application Classification and Identification (WACI)

There is considerable interest in identifying network traffic by application to support network provisioning, network security, and service quality. Techniques that rely on a well-known port number to identify an application may give a gross notion of the spread of applications, but it is not a reliable means for application identification in the face of evasion. There has been work in using traffic characteristics to construct application equivalence classes, using techniques such as machine learning, principal component analysis, deep packet inspection and others. The Workshop on Application Classification and Identification (WACI) aims to bring together the most active researchers in this research area. The main objectives of the one-day workshop will be to discuss recent advancements in this field, discuss new approaches and their implications, and identify open problems that require further research.

Topics of interest (include, but are not limited to): - Statistical methods for identifying application-layer protocols - Methods for finding application classes (file transfer, interactive, etc.) - Efficient schemes for using deep packet inspection to identify applications - Identifying applications within tunnels - Identifying rogue/nefarious applications - Peer-to-peer application identification - Peer-to-peer traffic characterization

Submission instructions

We invite interested researchers to submit a 1-2 page abstract or position statement. Abstracts will be chosen based on their relevance to the area of application identification, and on the diversity of the covered topics. There will be no full-paper submissions or proceedings. Authors of accepted abstracts however should plan to give a 25-minute presentation that will be posted at the workshop's web page (TBA). A significant part of the workshop will be given to discussions and interaction among participants. Submissions must be in electronic form, as plain-text or PDF (if graphs are included) documents, and they should be submitted by e-mail to: Tim Strayer (strayer@bbn.com).

Registration

Attendance at this workshop will be by invitation. Authors of submitted abstracts should commit that they will attend the workshop if their abstract is accepted. Others interested in attending should indicate this in email to Tim Strayer (strayer@bbn.com). There will be no registration fee.

Important Dates - July 1, 2007 - submission of 1-2 pages abstract - August 15, 2007 - acceptance notification - October 3, 2007 - workshop at BBN Technologies

Workshop Location

WACI will be held at: BBN Technologies 10 Moulton Street Cambridge MA, USA

Organizing and program committee

- Tim Strayer, chair (BBN, strayer@bbn.com) - Mark Allman (ICIR-ICSI, mallman@acm.org) - Grenville Armitage (Swinburne University, garmitage@swin,edu.au) - Steve Bellovin (Columbia University, smb@cs.columbia.edu) - Shudong Jin (Case Western Reserve University, jins@case.edu) - Andrew Moore (CUCL, andrew.moore@cl.cam.ac.uk)

Sponsors

The workshop is sponsored by the IRTF's Internet Measurement Research Group and hosted by BBN Technologies.