NetMamba: Efficient Network Traffic Classification via Pre-training Unidirectional Mamba

TL;DR

NetMamba introduces an efficient, linear-time network traffic classification model using a tailored unidirectional Mamba architecture, achieving high accuracy, speed, and few-shot learning capabilities over multiple datasets.

Contribution

It is the first to adapt the Mamba architecture for network traffic classification, addressing efficiency and representation challenges with a novel traffic scheme.

Findings

Achieves nearly 99% accuracy across tasks

Improves inference speed by up to 60 times

Demonstrates superior few-shot learning performance

Abstract

Network traffic classification is a crucial research area aiming to enhance service quality, streamline network management, and bolster cybersecurity. To address the growing complexity of transmission encryption techniques, various machine learning and deep learning methods have been proposed. However, existing approaches face two main challenges. Firstly, they struggle with model inefficiency due to the quadratic complexity of the widely used Transformer architecture. Secondly, they suffer from inadequate traffic representation because of discarding important byte information while retaining unwanted biases. To address these challenges, we propose NetMamba, an efficient linear-time state space model equipped with a comprehensive traffic representation scheme. We adopt a specially selected and improved unidirectional Mamba architecture for the networking field, instead of the Transformer, to address efficiency issues. In addition, we design a traffic representation scheme to extract valid information from massive traffic data while removing biased information. Evaluation experiments on six public datasets encompassing three main classification tasks showcase NetMamba's superior classification performance compared to state-of-the-art baselines. It achieves an accuracy rate of nearly 99% (some over 99%) in all tasks. Additionally, NetMamba demonstrates excellent efficiency, improving inference speed by up to 60 times while maintaining comparably low memory usage. Furthermore, NetMamba exhibits superior few-shot learning abilities, achieving better classification performance with fewer labeled data. To the best of our knowledge, NetMamba is the first model to tailor the Mamba architecture for networking.