Mean Masked Autoencoder with Flow-Mixing for Encrypted Traffic Classification

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Abstract:Network traffic classification using self-supervised pre-training models based on Masked Autoencoders (MAE) has demonstrated a huge potential. However, existing methods are confined to isolated byte-level reconstruction of individual flows, lacking adequate perception of the multi-granularity contextual relationship in traffic. To address this limitation, we propose Mean MAE (MMAE), a teacher-student MAE paradigm with flow mixing strategy for building encrypted traffic pre-training model. MMAE employs a self-distillation mechanism for teacher-student interaction, where the teacher provides unmasked flow-level semantic supervision to advance the student from local byte reconstruction to multi-granularity comprehension. To break the information bottleneck in individual flows, we introduce a dynamic Flow Mixing (FlowMix) strategy to replace traditional random masking mechanism. By constructing challenging cross-flow mixed samples with interferences, it compels the model to learn discriminative representations from distorted tokens. Furthermore, we design a Packet-importance aware Mask Predictor (PMP) equipped with an attention bias mechanism that leverages packet-level side-channel statistics to dynamically mask tokens with high semantic density. Numerous experiments on a number of datasets covering encrypted applications, malware, and attack traffic demonstrate that MMAE achieves state-of-the-art performance. The code is available at this https URL

Comments: Project page \url{this https URL}

Subjects:

Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Multimedia (cs.MM); Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI)

Cite as: arXiv:2603.29537 [cs.CR]

(or arXiv:2603.29537v1 [cs.CR] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.29537

arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history

From: Lei Zhang [view email] [v1] Tue, 31 Mar 2026 10:19:54 UTC (2,554 KB)