SoK: Where Do Flow Labels Come From? Auditing Label Provenance in Encrypted Traffic Benchmarks
Encrypted traffic classification infers semantics beyond the flow record from transport-layer observables, and supervised training rests on labels that hold for the individual flow they are attached to. Recent systematizations scrutinize model in- puts and data splits; we systematize the complementary label side. Across 14 audited benchmark entries, we identify two recurring label-side strategies: coarse inheritance, which risks labelling flows the evidence does not cover, and overstrict filtering, which keeps only self-attesting flows and risks dis- carding relevant ones. No audited entry exposes a countable pre-selection population, and the task objects downstream papers attach to the s...
| Authors | Sizhe Huang, Shujie Yang |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.NI |
| Published | 2 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 2 September 2026 |
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