Adversarial examples are inputs to a machine learning system intentionally crafted by an attacker to fool the model into producing an incorrect output. These examples have achieved a great deal of success in several domains such as image recognition, speech recognition and spam detection. In this paper, we study the nature of the adversarial problem in Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS). We focus on the attack perspective, which includes techniques to generate adversarial examples capable of evading a variety of machine learning models. More specifically, we explore the use of evolutionary computation (particle swarm optimization and genetic algorithm) and deep learning (generative adversarial networks) as tools for adversarial example generation. To assess the performance of these algorithms in evading a NIDS, we apply them to two publicly available data sets, namely the NSL-KDD and UNSW-NB15, and we contrast them to a baseline perturbation method: Monte Carlo simulation. The results show that our adversarial example generation techniques cause high misclassification rates in eleven different machine learning models, along with a voting classifier. Our work highlights the vulnerability of machine learning based NIDS in the face of adversarial perturbation.
Sharif University of Technology（谢里夫理工大学）；Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences (IPM)（基础科学研究所（IPM））
This paper presents a simple yet efficient method for an anomaly-based Intrusion Detection System (IDS). In reality, IDSs can be defined as a one-class classification system, where the normal traffic is the target class. The high diversity of network attacks in addition to the need for generalization, motivate us to propose a semi-supervised method. Inspired by the successes of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) for training deep models in semi-unsupervised setting, we have proposed an end-to-end deep architecture for IDS. The proposed architecture is composed of two deep networks, each of…
Recreating cyber-attack alert data with a high level of fidelity is challenging due to the intricate interaction between features, non-homogeneity of alerts, and potential for rare yet critical samples. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have been shown to effectively learn complex data distributions with the intent of creating increasingly realistic data. This paper presents the application of GANs to cyber-attack alert data and shows that GANs not only successfully learn to generate realistic alerts, but also reveal feature dependencies within alerts. This is accomplished by reviewing th…
The boundaries of cyber-physical systems (CPS) and the Internet of Things (IoT) are converging together day by day to introduce a common platform on hybrid systems. Moreover, the combination of artificial intelligence (AI) with CPS creates a new dimension of technological advancement. All these connectivity and dependability are creating massive space for the attackers to launch cyber attacks. To defend against these attacks, intrusion detection system (IDS) has been widely used. However, emerging CPS technologies suffer from imbalanced and missing sample data, which makes the training of IDS …
Generative adversarial networks have been able to generate striking results in various domains. This generation capability can be general while the networks gain deep understanding regarding the data distribution. In many domains, this data distribution consists of anomalies and normal data, with the anomalies commonly occurring relatively less, creating datasets that are imbalanced. The capabilities that generative adversarial networks offer can be leveraged to examine these anomalies and help alleviate the challenge that imbalanced datasets propose via creating synthetic anomalies. This anom…
To reap the benefits of the Internet of Things (IoT), it is imperative to secure the system against cyber attacks in order to enable mission critical and real-time applications. To this end, intrusion detection systems (IDSs) have been widely used to detect anomalies caused by a cyber attacker in IoT systems. However, due to the large-scale nature of the IoT, an IDS must operate in a distributed manner with minimum dependence on a central controller. Moreover, in many scenarios such as health and financial applications, the datasets are private and IoTDs may not intend to share such data. To t…
The network intrusion detection task is challenging because of the imbalanced and unlabeled nature of the dataset it operates on. Existing generative adversarial networks (GANs), are primarily used for creating synthetic samples from reals. They also have been proved successful in anomaly detection tasks. In our proposed method, we construct the trained encoder-discriminator as a one-class classifier based on Bidirectional GAN (Bi-GAN) for detecting anomalous traffic from normal traffic other than calculating expensive and complex anomaly scores or thresholds. Our experimental result illustrat…
Attacks on computer networks have increased significantly in recent days, due in part to the availability of sophisticated tools for launching such attacks as well as thriving underground cyber-crime economy to support it. Over the past several years, researchers in academia and industry used machine learning (ML) techniques to design and implement Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSes) for computer networks. Many of these researchers used datasets collected by various organizations to train ML models for predicting intrusions. In many of the datasets used in such systems, data are imbalanced (i.…
In the last decade, the use of Machine Learning techniques in anomaly-based intrusion detection systems has seen much success. However, recent studies have shown that Machine learning in general and deep learning specifically are vulnerable to adversarial attacks where the attacker attempts to fool models by supplying deceptive input. Research in computer vision, where this vulnerability was first discovered, has shown that adversarial images designed to fool a specific model can deceive other machine learning models. In this paper, we investigate the transferability of adversarial network tra…
Royal Military Academy（皇家军事学院）；Université Libre de Bruxelles（布鲁塞尔自由大学）
Nowadays, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) report state-of-the-art results in many machine learning areas, including intrusion detection. Nevertheless, recent studies in computer vision have shown that DNNs can be vulnerable to adversarial attacks that are capable of deceiving them into misclassification by injecting specially crafted data. In security-critical areas, such attacks can cause serious damage; therefore, in this paper, we examine the effect of adversarial attacks on deep learning-based intrusion detection. In addition, we investigate the effectiveness of adversarial training as a defen…
University of Exeter（埃克塞特大学）；China University of Petroleum (East China)（中国石油大学（华东））
Intrusion detection systems (IDSs) play an important role in identifying malicious attacks and threats in networking systems. As fundamental tools of IDSs, learning based classification methods have been widely employed. When it comes to detecting network intrusions in small sample sizes (e.g., emerging intrusions), the limited number and imbalanced proportion of training samples usually cause significant challenges in training supervised and semi-supervised classifiers. In this paper, we propose a general network intrusion detection framework to address the challenges of both \emph{data scarc…
Neural networks are increasingly used for intrusion detection on industrial control systems (ICS). With neural networks being vulnerable to adversarial examples, attackers who wish to cause damage to an ICS can attempt to hide their attacks from detection by using adversarial example techniques. In this work we address the domain specific challenges of constructing such attacks against autoregressive based intrusion detection systems (IDS) in an ICS setting. We model an attacker that can compromise a subset of sensors in a ICS which has a LSTM based IDS. The attacker manipulates the data sent …
Due to their massive success in various domains, deep learning techniques are increasingly used to design network intrusion detection solutions that detect and mitigate unknown and known attacks with high accuracy detection rates and minimal feature engineering. However, it has been found that deep learning models are vulnerable to data instances that can mislead the model to make incorrect classification decisions so-called (adversarial examples). Such vulnerability allows attackers to target NIDSs by adding small crafty perturbations to the malicious traffic to evade detection and disrupt th…
Université Libre de Bruxelles（布鲁塞尔自由大学）；Royal Military Academy（皇家军事学院）；Ecole Militaire Polytechnique（军事理工学院）
Nowadays, intrusion detection systems based on deep learning deliver state-of-the-art performance. However, recent research has shown that specially crafted perturbations, called adversarial examples, are capable of significantly reducing the performance of these intrusion detection systems. The objective of this paper is to design an efficient transfer learning-based adversarial detector and then to assess the effectiveness of using multiple strategically placed adversarial detectors compared to a single adversarial detector for intrusion detection systems. In our experiments, we implement ex…
Despite the growing popularity of modern machine learning techniques (e.g. Deep Neural Networks) in cyber-security applications, most of these models are perceived as a black-box for the user. Adversarial machine learning offers an approach to increase our understanding of these models. In this paper we present an approach to generate explanations for incorrect classifications made by data-driven Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs). An adversarial approach is used to find the minimum modifications (of the input features) required to correctly classify a given set of misclassified samples. The m…
Faculty of Information Technology, Brno University of Technology（布尔诺理工大学信息技术学院）
In this paper, we present three datasets that have been built from network traffic traces using ASNM features, designed in our previous work. The first dataset was built using a state-of-the-art dataset called CDX 2009, while the remaining two datasets were collected by us in 2015 and 2018, respectively. These two datasets contain several adversarial obfuscation techniques that were applied onto malicious as well as legitimate traffic samples during the execution of particular TCP network connections. Adversarial obfuscation techniques were used for evading machine learning-based network intru…
Exploring the Effect of DNN Depth on Adversarial Attacks in Network Intrusion Detection Systems
Computer Engineering Carleton University Ottawa, Canada（计算机工程 卡尔顿大学渥太华加拿大）；School of Information Technology Carleton University Ottawa, Canada（信息科技学院 卡尔顿大学渥太华加拿大）
Adversarial attacks have been widely studied in the field of computer vision but their impact on network security applications remains an area of open research. As IoT, 5G and AI continue to converge to realize the promise of the fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0), security incidents and events on IoT networks have increased. Deep learning techniques are being applied to detect and mitigate many of such security threats against IoT networks. Feedforward Neural Networks (FNN) have been widely used for classifying intrusion attacks in IoT networks. In this paper, we consider a variant o…
Research Group on Intelligent Engineering and Computing for Advanced Innovation and Development (GECAD), School of Engineering, Polytechnic of Porto (ISEP/IPP)（先进创新与发展智能工程与计算研究组（GECAD），波尔图理工学院工程学院（ISEP/IPP））
The Internet of Things (IoT) faces tremendous security challenges. Machine learning models can be used to tackle the growing number of cyber-attack variations targeting IoT systems, but the increasing threat posed by adversarial attacks restates the need for reliable defense strategies. This work describes the types of constraints required for a realistic adversarial cyber-attack example and proposes a methodology for a trustworthy adversarial robustness analysis with a realistic adversarial evasion attack vector. The proposed methodology was used to evaluate three supervised algorithms, Rando…
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Indiana University Bloomington（印第安纳大学伯明顿分校）
As an essential tool in security, the intrusion detection system bears the responsibility of the defense to network attacks performed by malicious traffic. Nowadays, with the help of machine learning algorithms, intrusion detection systems develop rapidly. However, the robustness of this system is questionable when it faces adversarial attacks. For the robustness of detection systems, more potential attack approaches are under research. In this paper, a framework of the generative adversarial networks, called IDSGAN, is proposed to generate the adversarial malicious traffic records aiming to a…
The incremental diffusion of machine learning algorithms in supporting cybersecurity is creating novel defensive opportunities but also new types of risks. Multiple researches have shown that machine learning methods are vulnerable to adversarial attacks that create tiny perturbations aimed at decreasing the effectiveness of detecting threats. We observe that existing literature assumes threat models that are inappropriate for realistic cybersecurity scenarios because they consider opponents with complete knowledge about the cyber detector or that can freely interact with the target systems. B…
Henan University（河南大学）；National Institute of Technology Kurukshetra（库鲁克舍特拉国立技术学院）；Asia University（亚洲大学）；GuangZhou University（广州大学）
With the continuous development of industrial IoT (IIoT) technology, network security is becoming more and more important. And intrusion detection is an important part of its security. However, since the amount of attack traffic is very small compared to normal traffic, this imbalance makes intrusion detection in it very difficult. To address this imbalance, an intrusion detection system called pretraining Wasserstein generative adversarial network intrusion detection system (PWG-IDS) is proposed in this paper. This system is divided into two main modules: 1) In this module, we introduce the p…
University of Maryland Baltimore County（马里兰大学巴尔的摩县分校）
With the recent developments in artificial intelligence and machine learning, anomalies in network traffic can be detected using machine learning approaches. Before the rise of machine learning, network anomalies which could imply an attack, were detected using well-crafted rules. An attacker who has knowledge in the field of cyber-defence could make educated guesses to sometimes accurately predict which particular features of network traffic data the cyber-defence mechanism is looking at. With this information, the attacker can circumvent a rule-based cyber-defense system. However, after the …
Edinburgh Napier University（爱丁堡龙比亚大学）；University of Hertfordshire（赫特福德大学）
As the internet continues to be populated with new devices and emerging technologies, the attack surface grows exponentially. Technology is shifting towards a profit-driven Internet of Things market where security is an afterthought. Traditional defending approaches are no longer sufficient to detect both known and unknown attacks to high accuracy. Machine learning intrusion detection systems have proven their success in identifying unknown attacks with high precision. Nevertheless, machine learning models are also vulnerable to attacks. Adversarial examples can be used to evaluate the robustn…
Ben Gurion University of the Negev（内盖夫本-古里安大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
Network intrusion attacks are a known threat. To detect such attacks, network intrusion detection systems (NIDSs) have been developed and deployed. These systems apply machine learning models to high-dimensional vectors of features extracted from network traffic to detect intrusions. Advances in NIDSs have made it challenging for attackers, who must execute attacks without being detected by these systems. Prior research on bypassing NIDSs has mainly focused on perturbing the features extracted from the attack traffic to fool the detection system, however, this may jeopardize the attack's funct…
Polytechnic of Porto（波尔图理工学院）；School of Engineering, Polytechnic of Porto（波尔图理工学院工程学院）
Adversarial attacks pose a major threat to machine learning and to the systems that rely on it. In the cybersecurity domain, adversarial cyber-attack examples capable of evading detection are especially concerning. Nonetheless, an example generated for a domain with tabular data must be realistic within that domain. This work establishes the fundamental constraint levels required to achieve realism and introduces the Adaptative Perturbation Pattern Method (A2PM) to fulfill these constraints in a gray-box setting. A2PM relies on pattern sequences that are independently adapted to the characteri…
Enhancing Adversarial Robustness of IoT Intrusion Detection via SHAP-Based Attribution Fingerprinting
School of Information Technology, York University（约克大学信息科技学院）；School of Computer Science, University of Guelph（圭尔夫大学计算机科学学院）；National Research Council of Canada（加拿大国家研究委员会）
The increase of cyber attacks in both the numbers and varieties in recent years demands to build a more sophisticated network intrusion detection system (NIDS). These NIDS perform better when they can monitor all the traffic traversing through the network like when being deployed on a Software-Defined Network (SDN). Because of the inability to detect zero-day attacks, signature-based NIDS which were traditionally used for detecting malicious traffic are beginning to get replaced by anomaly-based NIDS built on neural networks. However, recently it has been shown that such NIDS have their own dr…
Université Libre de Bruxelles（布鲁塞尔自由大学）；Royal Military Academy（皇家军事学院）；Ecole Militaire Polytechnique（军事理工学院）
Nowadays, numerous applications incorporate machine learning (ML) algorithms due to their prominent achievements. However, many studies in the field of computer vision have shown that ML can be fooled by intentionally crafted instances, called adversarial examples. These adversarial examples take advantage of the intrinsic vulnerability of ML models. Recent research raises many concerns in the cybersecurity field. An increasing number of researchers are studying the feasibility of such attacks on security systems based on ML algorithms, such as Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS). The feasibilit…
Chonnam National University（全南国立大学）；Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）；Ahmadu Bello University（艾哈迈德·贝罗大学）
The internet-of-Vehicle (IoV) can facilitate seamless connectivity between connected vehicles (CV), autonomous vehicles (AV), and other IoV entities. Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) for IoV networks can rely on machine learning (ML) to protect the in-vehicle network from cyber-attacks. Blockchain-based Federated Forests (BFFs) could be used to train ML models based on data from IoV entities while protecting the confidentiality of the data and reducing the risks of tampering with the data. However, ML models created this way are still vulnerable to evasion, poisoning, and exploratory attacks…
Shanghai University（上海大学）；Xi’an Innovation College, Yan’an University（延安大学西安创新学院）；United Automotive Electronic Systems Co.（联合汽车电子有限公司）
As an active network security protection scheme, intrusion detection system (IDS) undertakes the important responsibility of detecting network attacks in the form of malicious network traffic. Intrusion detection technology is an important part of IDS. At present, many scholars have carried out extensive research on intrusion detection technology. However, developing an efficient intrusion detection method for massive network traffic data is still difficult. Since Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have powerful modeling capabilities for complex high-dimensional data, they provide new idea…
An Adversarial Robustness Benchmark for Enterprise Network Intrusion Detection
Research Group on Intelligent Engineering and Computing for Advanced Innovation and Development (GECAD), School of Engineering, Polytechnic of Porto (ISEP/IPP)（高级创新与发展智能工程与计算研究组（GECAD），波尔图理工学院工程学院（ISEP/IPP））
Machine learning (ML), especially deep learning (DL) techniques have been increasingly used in anomaly-based network intrusion detection systems (NIDS). However, ML/DL has shown to be extremely vulnerable to adversarial attacks, especially in such security-sensitive systems. Many adversarial attacks have been proposed to evaluate the robustness of ML-based NIDSs. Unfortunately, existing attacks mostly focused on feature-space and/or white-box attacks, which make impractical assumptions in real-world scenarios, leaving the study on practical gray/black-box attacks largely unexplored. To bridge …
Université Libre de Bruxelles（布鲁塞尔自由大学）；Royal Military Academy（皇家军事学院）；Ecole Militaire Polytechnique（军事理工学院）
Due to the numerous advantages of machine learning (ML) algorithms, many applications now incorporate them. However, many studies in the field of image classification have shown that MLs can be fooled by a variety of adversarial attacks. These attacks take advantage of ML algorithms' inherent vulnerability. This raises many questions in the cybersecurity field, where a growing number of researchers are recently investigating the feasibility of such attacks against machine learning-based security systems, such as intrusion detection systems. The majority of this research demonstrates that it is…
University of Miskolc（米什科尔茨大学）；Mutah University（穆塔大学）
Intrusion detection system (IDS) is one of the implemented solutions against harmful attacks. Furthermore, attackers always keep changing their tools and techniques. However, implementing an accepted IDS system is also a challenging task. In this paper, several experiments have been performed and evaluated to assess various machine learning classifiers based on KDD intrusion dataset. It succeeded to compute several performance metrics in order to evaluate the selected classifiers. The focus was on false negative and false positive performance metrics in order to enhance the detection rate of t…
