Abstract
Since HTTP is responsible for more than 25% of the total traffic volume in the Internet, we are curious about what happens in the http traffic and what it contains. We collected an anonymized HTTP head only data from a DSL line of a campus’s border for continuous 11 days. In this paper, we focus on the user-agent (UA) strings. We first improve a well know open source UASparser, identifying 34.4% (9.8%) more user-agent types (operator system) of overall transactions. In addition, our analysis of user-agent strings shows that Windows XP contributes to more than half of personal computer (PC) HTTP traffic. Mobile devices account for more than 16% of total transactions, and automatic programs share at least 20%. These information leads to following conclusions: PC devices in China are threatened to a huge risk as security support for Windows XP has been stopped recently; mobile devices occupy a big proportion in total transactions of a DSL lines, larger than other researchers [10] noticed 4 or 5 years ago; Android and IOS devices dominate the mobile transactions; automatic programs take up at least one fifth of all HTTP traffic and that means the researcher should no longer ignore the influence of them.
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Xu, Y., Xiong, G., Zhao, Y., Guo, L. (2014). Toward Identifying and Understanding User-Agent Strings in HTTP Traffic. In: Han, W., Huang, Z., Hu, C., Zhang, H., Guo, L. (eds) Web Technologies and Applications. APWeb 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8710. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11119-3_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11119-3_17
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-11118-6
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