Multi-View Fusion for Encrypted C2 Detection: A Leakage-Controlled Measurement Study of Evaluation Pitfalls

Hoang-Huy Nguyen-Huu, Van-Tri Phan, Khuong Nguyen-An

Command-and-control (C2) traffic increasingly hides within TLS, so defenders now apply machine learning to traffic metadata. Many studies assume that combining two metadata views, namely flow statistics and TLS handshake fingerprints, improves both accuracy and robustness. We tested this assumption on 17,577 TLS flows from 62 real Cobalt Strike captures. Our evaluation removes the data leakage that leads to overly optimistic reported scores. We report three findings that matter more than the fusion result itself. First, an incorrect preprocessing step increases the F1 score by 0.28. This step computes the frequency encoding across the entire dataset rather than within each cross-validation fold. The increase is about ten times larger than any real effect we measured. Second, both the labels and the behavioral features depend on the destination address. Because of this, the 17,577 flows form only 2,132 independent groups, and the positive rate of 55.1\%, which looks balanced, drops to 4.2\%. Therefore, class balance is just a result of how we analyze the data, specifically whether we count flows or endpoints, and not a real feature of the task. Third, 20 of the 62 captures (32\%)…