Mind the Gap Between HTTP and HTTPS in Mobile Networks

Fueled by a plethora of applications and Internet services, mobile data consumption is on the rise. Over the years, mobile operators deployed webproxies to optimize HTTP content delivery. Webproxies also produce HTTP-logs which are a fundamental data source to understand network/services performance and user behavior. The recent surge of HTTPS is progressively reducing such wealth of information, to the point that it is unclear whether HTTP-logs are still representative of the overall traffic. Unfortunately, HTTPS monitoring is challenging and adds some extra cost which refrains operators from “turning on the switch”. In this work, we study the “gap” between HTTP and HTTPS both quantifying their intrinsic traffic characteristics, and investigating the usability of the information that can be logged from their transactions. We leverage a 24-hours dataset collected from a webproxy operated by a European mobile carrier with more than 10M subscribers. Our quantification of this gap suggests that its importance is strictly related to the target analysis.