Dual-GAN Framework for Adversarial Robust Intrusion Detection Systems
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Abstract
The importance of intrusion detection systems (IDSs) is part of existing cybersecurity facilities. However, existing machine learning-based IDSs are vulnerable to adversarial attacks and evasion techniques. Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have demonstrated the possibility of using synthetic data augmentation to address the problem of imbalance in network security datasets. Nevertheless, current methods examine performance using clean datasets without considering resilience to adversarial corruption. In this study, a framework of dual GAN (DGF) is proposed, in which one of the GANs produces data to augment the data with synthetic pairs of data, and the other GAN generates adversarial instances to improve the robustness of the model in the training process. The synthesis of synthetic data and the adversarial robustness of intrusion detection have been under-researched. The proposed framework focuses on this aspect. The experimental results on the NSL-KDD benchmark dataset indicate that DGF decreases the false-negative rates by an absolute percentage of 1.11 points (11.11% on clean data and 10.00% on evasion conditions in its own standings, and its relative performance is decreased by 41.5 %–46.0% on augmentation-only baselines. The accuracy of the framework in detecting clean data reached 92.44%, and under adversarial conditions, 92.13% (only 0.31 percentage points decreased). This is better than the existing procedures, which have a reduction in accuracy of over 30% in the case of the same perturbations. These findings reveal how dual-purpose GAN architectures can be useful in designing IDSs that work in adversarial network settings.
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