In computer networking, network traffic refers to the amount of data transmitted in the form of packets between internetworked computers or systems. Monitoring and analyzing network traffic is crucial for ensuring the performance, security, and reliability of a network. However, a significant challenge in network traffic analysis is to process diverse data packets including both ciphertext and plaintext. While many methods have been adopted to analyze network traffic, they often rely on different datasets for performance evaluation. This inconsistency results in substantial manual data processing efforts and unfair comparisons. Moreover, some data processing methods may cause data leakage due to improper separation of training and test data. To address these issues, we introduce NetBench, a large-scale and comprehensive benchmark dataset for assessing machine learning models, especially foundation models, in both traffic classification and generation tasks. NetBench is built upon seven publicly available datasets and encompasses a broad spectrum of 20 tasks, including 15 classification tasks and 5 generation tasks. Furthermore, we evaluate eight State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) classification models and two generative models using our benchmark. The results show that foundation models significantly outperform the traditional deep learning methods in traffic classification. We believe NetBench will facilitate fair comparisons among various approaches and advance the development of foundation models for network traffic. Our benchmark is available at https://github.com/WM-JayLab/NetBench.

翻译：在网络领域，网络流量指互联计算机或系统之间以数据包形式传输的数据量。监测与分析网络流量对于保障网络性能、安全性和可靠性至关重要。然而，网络流量分析面临的重大挑战在于需处理包含密文与明文的多样化数据包。尽管已有多种方法被用于分析网络流量，但这些方法通常依赖不同数据集进行性能评估。这种不一致性导致大量人工数据处理工作及不公平比较。此外，某些数据处理方法可能因训练数据与测试数据划分不当引发数据泄露。为解决上述问题，我们提出NetBench——一个用于评估机器学习模型（尤其是基础模型）在流量分类与生成任务中表现的大规模综合性基准数据集。NetBench基于七个公开数据集构建，涵盖20项广泛任务，包括15项分类任务与5项生成任务。同时，我们采用该基准评估了八种最先进的（SOTA）分类模型与两种生成模型。结果表明，基础模型在流量分类任务中显著优于传统深度学习方法。我们相信NetBench将促进各类方法的公平比较，并推动网络流量领域基础模型的发展。本基准数据集访问地址：https://github.com/WM-JayLab/NetBench。