Flow-MAE: Leveraging Masked AutoEncoder for Accurate, Efficient and Robust Malicious Traffic Classification

Malicious traffic classification is crucial for Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS). However, traditional Machine Learning approaches necessitate expert knowledge and a significant amount of well-labeled data. Although recent studies have employed pre-training models from the Natural Language Processing domain, such as ET-BERT, for traffic classification, their effectiveness is impeded by limited input length and fixed Byte Pair Encoding.