In recent years， Remote Access Trojans （RATs） have been widely used by hackers for malicious activities such as data theft， system compromise， and ransomware attacks， and their stealth and persistence make them a major threat in the field of cybersecurity. Since the traditional RAT detection methods have low detection rates and high false negative rates when facing encrypted traffic and protocol obfuscation， RAT detection based on traffic analysis has emerged as a cybersecurity research hotspot due to its deep insight capability into communication behaviors. Through extensive literature research， a detailed introduction to the latest research progress using traffic analysis to identify RATs was given. First， a brief overview of the communication principles and detection methods of RAT was provided. Second， the current RAT detection methods using traffic analysis were summarized as the focus. Third， the specific application scenarios of RAT detection were summarized from a practical application perspective. Finally， the problems in the current research process were discussed， and the future development directions were proposed.