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

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 encounter two main challenges. Firstly, they struggle with model inefficiency due to the quadratic complexity of the widely used Transformer architecture. Secondly, they suffer from unreliable 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 replace the Transformer with our specially selected and improved Mamba architecture for the networking field to address efficiency issues. In addition, we design a scheme for traffic representation, which is used to extract valid information from massive traffic 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 up to 4.83% higher accuracy and 4.64% higher f1 score on encrypted traffic classification tasks. Additionally, NetMamba demonstrates excellent efficiency, improving inference speed by 2.24 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.