
{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,5,16]],"date-time":"2026-05-16T16:14:31Z","timestamp":1778948071198,"version":"3.51.4"},"reference-count":30,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"4","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2025,4,16]],"date-time":"2025-04-16T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1744761600000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100001809","name":"National Natural Science Foundation of China","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["62362040"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["62362040"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100001809","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Information"],"abstract":"<jats:p>With the widespread use of encryption protocols on network data, fast and effective encryption traffic classification can improve the efficiency of traffic analysis. A resampling method combining Wasserstein GAN and random selection is proposed for solving the dataset imbalance problem, and it uses Wasserstein GAN for oversampling and random selection for undersampling to achieve class equalization. Based on Mamba, an ultra-low parametric quantity model, we propose an encrypted traffic classification model, ET-Mamba, which has a pre-training phase and a fine-tuning phase. During the pre-training phase, positional embedding is used to characterize the blocks of the traffic grayscale image, and random masking is used to strengthen the learning of the intrinsic correlation among the blocks of the traffic grayscale image. During the fine-tuning phase, the agent attention mechanism is adopted in the feature extraction phase to achieve global information modeling at a low computational cost, and the SmoothLoss function is designed to solve the problem of the insufficient generalization ability of cross-entropy loss function during training. The experimental results show that the proposed model significantly reduces the number of parameters and outperforms other models in terms of classification accuracy on non-VPN datasets.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/info16040314","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2025,4,16]],"date-time":"2025-04-16T06:12:06Z","timestamp":1744783926000},"page":"314","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":3,"title":["ET-Mamba: A Mamba Model for Encrypted Traffic Classification"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"16","author":[{"given":"Jian","family":"Xu","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"State Grid Jiangxi Electric Power Research Institute, Nanchang 330096, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Liangbing","family":"Chen","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Information and Computer Engineering, Jiangxi Normal University, Nanchang 330022, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Wenqian","family":"Xu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"State Grid Jiangxi Electric Power Research Institute, Nanchang 330096, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Longxuan","family":"Dai","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Information and Computer Engineering, Jiangxi Normal University, Nanchang 330022, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Chenxi","family":"Wang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Information and Computer Engineering, Jiangxi Normal University, Nanchang 330022, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-9481-4176","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Lei","family":"Hu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Information and Computer Engineering, Jiangxi Normal University, Nanchang 330022, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2025,4,16]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","unstructured":"Gu, A., and Dao, T. (2023). Mamba: Linear-time sequence modeling with selective state spaces. arXiv."},{"key":"ref_2","unstructured":"Arjovsky, M., Chintala, S., and Bottou, L. (2017, January 6\u201311). Wasserstein generative adversarial networks. Proceedings of the International Conference on Machine Learning, Sydney, Australia."},{"key":"ref_3","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Bar-Yanai, R., Langberg, M., and Peleg, D. (2010, January 20\u201322). Realtime classification for encrypted traffic. Proceedings of the International Symposium on Experimental Algorithms, Naples, Italy.","DOI":"10.1007\/978-3-642-13193-6_32"},{"key":"ref_4","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"76","DOI":"10.1109\/MCOM.2019.1800819","article-title":"Deep learning for encrypted traffic classification: An overview","volume":"57","author":"Rezaei","year":"2019","journal-title":"IEEE Commun. Mag."},{"key":"ref_5","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Huang, Y.F., Lin, C.B., and Chung, C.M. (2021). Research on qos classification of network encrypted traffic behavior based on machine learning. Electronics, 10.","DOI":"10.3390\/electronics10121376"},{"key":"ref_6","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Wang, W., Zhu, M., Wang, J., Zeng, X., and Yang, Z. (2017, January 22\u201324). End-to-end encrypted traffic classification with one-dimensional convolution neural networks. Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics, Beijing, China.","DOI":"10.1109\/ISI.2017.8004872"},{"key":"ref_7","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"114363","DOI":"10.1016\/j.eswa.2020.114363","article-title":"Tree-RNN: Tree structural recurrent neural network for network traffic classification","volume":"167","author":"Ren","year":"2021","journal-title":"Expert Syst. Appl."},{"key":"ref_8","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Mei, Y., Luktarhan, N., Zhao, G., and Yang, X. (2024). An Encrypted Traffic Classification Approach Based on Path Signature Features and LSTM. Electronics, 13.","DOI":"10.3390\/electronics13153060"},{"key":"ref_9","unstructured":"Huoh, T.L., Luo, Y., and Zhang, T. (2021, January 17\u201321). Encrypted network traffic classification using a geometric learning model. Proceedings of the 2021 IFIP\/IEEE International Symposium on Integrated Network Management, Bordeaux, France."},{"key":"ref_10","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Zou, Z., Ge, J., Zheng, H., Wu, Y., Han, C., and Yao, Z. (2018, January 28\u201330). Encrypted traffic classification with a convolutional long short-term memory neural network. Proceedings of the 2018 IEEE 20th International Conference on High Performance Computing and Communications; IEEE 16th International Conference on Smart City; IEEE 4th International Conference on Data Science and Systems, Exeter, UK.","DOI":"10.1109\/HPCC\/SmartCity\/DSS.2018.00074"},{"key":"ref_11","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"619","DOI":"10.32604\/iasc.2023.036701","article-title":"MTC: A Multi-Task Model for Encrypted Network Traffic Classification Based on Transformer and 1D-CNN","volume":"37","author":"Wang","year":"2023","journal-title":"Intell. Autom. Soft Comput."},{"key":"ref_12","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Lin, X., Xiong, G., Gou, G., Li, Z., Shi, J., and Yu, J. (2022, January 25\u201329). Et-bert: A contextualized datagram representation with pre-training transformers for encrypted traffic classification. Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference, Lyon, France.","DOI":"10.1145\/3485447.3512217"},{"key":"ref_13","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Wang, T., Xie, X., Wang, W., Wang, C., Zhao, Y., and Cui, Y. (2024, January 28\u201331). Netmamba: Efficient network traffic classification via pre-training unidirectional mamba. Proceedings of the 2024 IEEE 32nd International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP), Charleroi, Belgium.","DOI":"10.1109\/ICNP61940.2024.10858569"},{"key":"ref_14","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"57","DOI":"10.1016\/j.eij.2022.06.006","article-title":"Classification of virtual private networks encrypted traffic using ensemble learning algorithms","volume":"23","author":"Almomani","year":"2022","journal-title":"Egypt. Inform. J."},{"key":"ref_15","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Qin, J., Liu, G., and Duan, K. (2022). A New Imbalanced Encrypted Traffic Classification Model Based on CBAM and Re-Weighted Loss Function. Appl. Sci., 12.","DOI":"10.3390\/app12199631"},{"key":"ref_16","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Rao, Y.N., and Suresh Babu, K. (2023). An imbalanced generative adversarial network-based approach for network intrusion detection in an imbalanced dataset. Sensors, 23.","DOI":"10.3390\/s23010550"},{"key":"ref_17","unstructured":"Wang, W., Zhu, M., Zeng, X., Ye, X., and Sheng, Y. (2017, January 11\u201313). Malware traffic classification using convolutional neural network for representation learning. Proceedings of the 2017 International Conference on Information Networking, Da Nang, Vietnam."},{"key":"ref_18","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Draper-Gil, G., Lashkari, A.H., Mamun, M.S.I., and Ghorbani, A.A. (2016, January 19\u201321). Characterization of encrypted and vpn traffic using time-related. Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy, Rome, Italy.","DOI":"10.5220\/0005740704070414"},{"key":"ref_19","unstructured":"Lashkari, A.H., Gil, G.D., Mamun, M.S.I., and Ghorbani, A.A. (2017, January 19\u201321). Characterization of tor traffic using time based features. Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy, Funchal, Portugal."},{"key":"ref_20","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Shapira, T., and Shavitt, Y. (May, January 29). Flowpic: Encrypted internet traffic classification is as easy as image recognition. Proceedings of the IEEE INFOCOM 2019-IEEE Conference on Computer Communications Workshops, Paris, France.","DOI":"10.1109\/INFCOMW.2019.8845315"},{"key":"ref_21","unstructured":"Heinsen, F.A. (2024). Softmax Attention with Constant Cost per Token. arXiv."},{"key":"ref_22","unstructured":"Katharopoulos, A., Vyas, A., Pappas, N., and Fleuret, F. (2020, January 12\u201318). Transformers are rnns: Fast autoregressive transformers with linear attention. Proceedings of the International Conference on Machine Learning, Virtual."},{"key":"ref_23","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Han, D., Ye, T., Han, Y., Xia, Z., Song, S., and Huang, G. (2023). Agent attention: On the integration of softmax and linear attention. arXiv.","DOI":"10.1007\/978-3-031-72973-7_8"},{"key":"ref_24","unstructured":"Mao, A., Mohri, M., and Zhong, Y. (2023, January 23\u201329). Cross-entropy loss functions: Theoretical analysis and applications. Proceedings of the International Conference on Machine Learning, Honolulu, HI, USA."},{"key":"ref_25","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"El Moutaouakil, K., Roudani, M., Ouhmid, A., Zhilenkov, A., and Mobayen, S. (2024). Decomposition and Symmetric Kernel Deep Neural Network Fuzzy Support Vector Machine. Symmetry, 16.","DOI":"10.3390\/sym16121585"},{"key":"ref_26","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1999","DOI":"10.1007\/s00500-019-04030-2","article-title":"Deep packet: A novel approach for encrypted traffic classification using deep learning","volume":"24","author":"Lotfollahi","year":"2020","journal-title":"Soft Comput."},{"key":"ref_27","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Liu, C., He, L., Xiong, G., Cao, Z., and Li, Z. (May, January 29). Fs-net: A flow sequence network for encrypted traffic classification. Proceedings of the IEEE INFOCOM 2019-IEEE Conference on Computer Communications, Paris, France.","DOI":"10.1109\/INFOCOM.2019.8737507"},{"key":"ref_28","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"He, H.Y., Yang, Z.G., and Chen, X.N. (2020, January 7\u201311). PERT: Payload encoding representation from transformer for encrypted traffic classification. Proceedings of the 2020 ITU Kaleidoscope: Industry-Driven Digital Transformation, Hanoi, Vietnam.","DOI":"10.23919\/ITUK50268.2020.9303204"},{"key":"ref_29","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"107974","DOI":"10.1016\/j.comnet.2021.107974","article-title":"TSCRNN: A novel classification scheme of encrypted traffic based on flow spatiotemporal features for efficient management of IIoT","volume":"190","author":"Lin","year":"2021","journal-title":"Comput. Netw."},{"key":"ref_30","unstructured":"Goyal, P., Doll\u00e1r, P., and Girshick, R. (2017). Accurate, large minibatch sgd: Training imagenet in 1 hour. arXiv."}],"container-title":["Information"],"original-title":[],"language":"en","link":[{"URL":"https:\/\/www.mdpi.com\/2078-2489\/16\/4\/314\/pdf","content-type":"unspecified","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"similarity-checking"}],"deposited":{"date-parts":[[2025,10,9]],"date-time":"2025-10-09T17:15:31Z","timestamp":1760030131000},"score":1,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/www.mdpi.com\/2078-2489\/16\/4\/314"}},"subtitle":[],"short-title":[],"issued":{"date-parts":[[2025,4,16]]},"references-count":30,"journal-issue":{"issue":"4","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2025,4]]}},"alternative-id":["info16040314"],"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/info16040314","relation":{},"ISSN":["2078-2489"],"issn-type":[{"value":"2078-2489","type":"electronic"}],"subject":[],"published":{"date-parts":[[2025,4,16]]}}}