Keysight’s 2021 Internet Application Trends
Influenced by emerging tech trends and continuation of the pandemic lifestyle, 2021 was an outstanding growth year for the internet applications. Apart from the big-tech, the small tech applications also could boost their user base. In this pandemic era, the use of financial / trading mobile applications has also risen significantly. We have also seen how the new transport layer protocol QUIC becomes the default choice of FAANGs for multimedia web applications.
Why Do We Need This?
Most of the classic application profiles based on standard reports do not provide sufficient coverage on the emerging and ephemeral trends of the internet. This has not been an issue until recently when the internet application trends became volatile due to the large-scale global events. So, most of the classic application profiles have diverged from the internet reality. The ATI team has embarked on creating new application profiles that fill this gap.
BPS Application Profiles
ATI Research Center always strives to stay on top of internet traffic trends and to produce the most relevant simulation content for our customers. Therefore, to cover all these different types of applications, we have released several application profiles in our traffic simulation product, BreakingPoint System (BPS). Application profiles contain the set of simulated application traffic flows (Super Flows) with great degrees of realism that feed into BPS app-sim test components.Each Super Flow will be assigned a weight that determines its significance in the application traffic and a seed that controls the stochastic properties of the generated static or dynamic application flows. Super Flows with higher weights will make up larger portion of the test traffic. List of Application Profiles that are published in 2021:
1. Social Audio Rooms 2021
Audio-based social networking applications are rapidly gaining popularity day by day, which enables users to participate and talk in live conversations with others. After Clubhouse started this feature, other tech giants like Twitter, Facebook, and Spotify added the audio room features in their applications. After seeing the rapid increase of social audio room traffic in the wire, the ATI team from Keysight Technologies has analyzed the network traffic of different popular social audio rooms applications and released an application profile in their ATI-2021-25 release. This simulates the traffic generated by the top four social audio room applications in 2021. List of mobile applications that are included in this application profile:
2. Alternative Social Media Traffic 2021
In this era of connecting other people virtually through social media, when people started paying attention to the privacy implementation of using the big platforms, a large crowd has started moving towards some 'honest' and 'unbiased' alternative social media platforms (alt-tech), fearing about the security of their private information. After analyzing the network traffic of different popular alternative social media applications, the ATI team from Keysight Technologies released an application profile in their ATI-2021-24 release. This simulates the traffic generated by the top four alternative (non-mainstream) social media applications in 2021. List of mobile applications that are included in this application profile:
3. Generic QUIC Mix 2021
Quick UDP Internet Connection (QUIC) is a new transport layer protocol, which is becoming the default choice of FAANGs for streaming and transferring data over the web. It runs over UDP that can replace TLS/TCP, because it can offer reliability (implemented in user-level like browser) and security (provides different layers of protection) while working blazingly fast.. QUIC currently occupies a large share in the network traffic bandwidth because of large corporations adopting it in their services. After a lot of research on different QUIC versions like GQUIC, IETF QUIC, and QUIC Facebook mvfst and finding the granular differences between them, the researchers at Keysight Technologies’ ATI team have come up with an application profile in their ATI-2021-16 release, which simulates the traffic that is generated by the top-most used QUIC versions in 2021. List of QUIC versions that are included in this application profile:
Note: QUIC Version-1 (RFC 9000) has been released in ATI-2022-03.
4. Top Financial Mobile Apps 2021 North America
In this current pandemic situation, the use of mobile banking apps has increased drastically in terms of cashless transactions. Starting from personal banking/finance to investing in stock market and crypto currency, people are more inclined to use the financial mobile apps rather than physically visiting the financial sectors. After analyzing the traffic of some popular and mostly used financial mobile applications, we’ve released an application profile in release ATI-2021-26. This simulates the traffic that is generated by the top six financial mobile applications in North America in 2021. List of mobile applications that are included in this application profile:
5. ICS/SCADA Traffic 2021
Industrial control systems (ICS) are a major segment within the operational technology (OT) sector. It comprises systems that are used to monitor and control the industrial processes. This could be mine site conveyor belts, oil refinery cracking towers, power consumption on electricity grids, or alarms from building information systems. ICSs are typically mission-critical applications with a high-availability requirement. SCADA systems show the process under control and provide access to the control functions. SCADA generally refers to control systems that span a large geographic area such as a gas pipeline, power transmission system, or water distribution system. The main purpose of SCADA is data acquisition: the networks consist of multiple remote terminal units (RTUs) that are used to collect data back at the central command centre, where they can be used to make high level decisions. After going through a lot of white papers and additional research on different popular ICS and SCADA network protocols, the researchers at Keysight Technologies’ ATI team have released an application profile in their ATI-2021-23 release, which simulates traffic that is generated by the top 23 ICS/SCADA protocols in 2021. List of ICS/SCADA applications that are included in this application profile:
Sandvine Application Profiles 2021:
Sandvine is an application and network intelligence company, which publishes their internet phenomena report periodically. Based on their mobile internet phenomena report that was published in May 2021, we have released five application profiles:
a. Sandvine 2021 Global Mobile Downstream
This application profile is in the ATI-2021-23 release. It contains the downstream (download) traffic that is generated by the top 10 global mobile applications as per the report. List of mobile applications that are included in this application profile:
b. Sandvine 2021 Global Mobile Social Media Downstream
This application profile is in the ATI-2021-22 release. It contains the downstream (download) traffic that is generated by the top five global social media applications as per the Sandvine report. List of mobile applications that are included in this application profile:
c. Sandvine 2021 Global Mobile Social Media Upstream
This application profile is in the ATI-2021-22 release. It contains the upstream (upload) traffic that is generated by the top five global social media applications as per the Sandvine report. List of mobile applications that are included in this application profile:
d. Sandvine 2021 Global Mobile Video Downstream
This application profile is in the ATI-2021-23 release. It contains the downstream (download) traffic that is generated by the top five global video streaming applications as per the Sandvine report. List of mobile applications that are included in this application profile:
e. Sandvine 2021 Global Mobile Video Upstream
This application profile is in the ATI-2021-23 release. It contains the upstream (upload) traffic that is generated by the top five global video streaming applications as per the Sandvine report. List of mobile applications that are included in this application profile:
Conclusion
These can be tested in numerous functional or performance-based scenarios. Users can determine what applications are blocked and to what degree. If certain applications experience degradation upon scaling more than others. Or if certain applications are unduly impacted more when security events occur.
Leverage Subscription Service to Stay Ahead of Attacks
Keysight's Application and Threat Intelligence (ATI) Subscription provides daily malware and bi-weekly updates of the latest application protocols and vulnerabilities for use with Keysight test platforms. The ATI Research Centre continuously monitors threats as they appear in the wild. Customers of **BreakingPoint **now have access to attack campaigns for different advanced persistent threats, allowing them to test their currently deployed security controls’ ability to detect or block such attacks.