Adversarial attacks against supervised machine learning based network intrusion detection systems

Investigating the use of moving target defense (MTD) mechanisms in IoT networks is ongoing research, with unfathomable potential to equip IoT devices and networks with the ability to fend off cyber attacks despite the computational deficiencies many IoT ecosystems typically have. The AI community has extensively studied adversarial threats and attacks on machine learning-based systems, emphasizing the need to address the potential compromise of anomaly-based intrusion detection systems (IDS) through adversarial attacks. Another concept that has gained significant attention in the networking community is Game Theory. Protecting any given network is almost a never-ending battle between the attacker and defender, and hence a natural game of competitors can be modelled based on one’s parametric specifications to gain more insight into how attackers might interact with one’s system. The goal of this thesis is to propose a comprehensive, experimentally verifiable game-theoretic model of MTD in IoT networks to secure the IDS against adversarial attacks. Once a game with state transitions based on given actions can be modelled, reinforcement learning is used to develop policies based on various episodes (rounds) of the game, ultimately optimizing network decisions to minimize successful attacks on machine learning-based IDS. The state-of-the-art ToN-IoT dataset was investigated for MTD feasibility to implement the feature-based MTD approach. The overall performance of the proposed MTD-based IDS was compared to a conventional IDS by analyzing the accuracy curve of the MTD-based IDS and the conventional IDS for varying attacker success rates and resource demands. Our approach has proven effective in securing the IDS against adversarial learning.

Untargeted white-box adversarial attack with heuristic defence methods in real-time deep learning based network intrusion detection system

Advanced EGAN-IDS Framework for Resilience against Adversarial Attacks using Multi-headed Attention Module

Boosting robustness of network intrusion detection systems: A novel two phase defense strategy against untargeted white-box optimization adversarial attack

Machine Learning-based Intrusion Detection Systems have been proven to be very effective in the protection of IoT Networks. However, the expansion of Adversarial Machine Learning attacks threatens their efficacy affecting also the security of IoT networks. Thus, this paper proposes a Machine Learning-driven methodology for multiclass classification of cyber-attacks in IoT networks and investigates the robustness of the Machine and Deep Learning classifiers against several well-known Adversarial Machine Learning attacks (JSMA, FGSM, DeepFool). Moreover, the effectiveness of the Adversarial Training defense method has been studied in tackling Adversarial Machine Learning attacks. The proposed methodology was evaluated using a new and large IoT dataset (IoTID20) and the experimental results concluded that the Random Forest classifier can classify the cyber-attacks with high classification accuracy (99.9%) as well as the JSMA, FGSM, and DeepFool attacks can significantly reduce the performance of all the classifiers. Finally, based on the evaluation adversarial training can overall enhance the classifiers’ robustness against all the utilized Adversarial Machine Learning attacks without affecting the performance when only normal samples are present.

Intrusion detection systems are used to detect attacks in a network. Machine learning (ML) approaches have been widely used to build such Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) because they are more accurate when built from a very large and representative dataset. In recent times, one of the benchmark datasets that are used to build ML-based Intrusion Detection models is CICIDS2017 dataset. The dataset is contained in eight groups and was collected from the Canadian Institute on Cyber Security dataset repository. The dataset is available in both PCAP and netflow formats. This study used the netflow records in the CIDIDS2017 dataset as they are found to contain newer attacks,very large and are found useful for traffic analysis. Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) techniques were used to reveal various characteristics of the dataset. The general objective is to provide more insights on the nature, structure and issues with the dataset so as to identify the best ways for using it to achieve improved ML-based IDS models. Furthermore, some of the open problems that can arise from the use of the dataset in any machine learning-based Intrusion Detection systems are highlighted and possible solutions are briefly discussed. The EDA techniques used revealed important relationships among input variables and the target class. The study concluded that the EDA can better influence the decision of future IDS researches that use the dataset. Thus, improved machine learning-based intrusion detection systems can be built from the dataset once it is well understood and pre-processed.

With computing devices and the Internet being indispensable in people's everyday life, malware has posed serious threats to their security, making its detection of utmost concern. To protect legitimate users from the evolving malware attacks, machine learning-based systems have been successfully deployed and offer unparalleled flexibility in automatic malware detection. In most of these systems, resting on the analysis of different content-based features either statically or dynamically extracted from the file samples, various kinds of classifiers are constructed to detect malware. However, besides content-based features, file-to-file relations, such as file co-existence, can provide valuable information in malware detection and make evasion harder. To better understand the properties of file-to-file relations, we construct the file co-existence graph. Resting on the constructed graph, we investigate the semantic relatedness among files, and leverage graph inference, active learning and graph representation learning for malware detection. Comprehensive experimental results on the real sample collections from Comodo Cloud Security Center demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed learning paradigms. As machine learning-based detection systems become more widely deployed, the incentive for defeating them increases. Therefore, we go further insight into the arms race between adversarial malware attack and defense, and aim to enhance the security of machine learning-based malware detection systems. In particular, we first explore the adversarial attacks under different scenarios (i.e., different levels of knowledge the attackers might have about the targeted learning system), and define a general attack strategy to thoroughly assess the adversarial behaviors. Then, considering different skills and capabilities of the attackers, we propose the corresponding secure-learning paradigms to counter the adversarial attacks and enhance the security of the learning systems while not compromising the detection accuracy. We conduct a series of comprehensive experimental studies based on the real sample collections from Comodo Cloud Security Center and the promising results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed secure-learning models, which can be readily applied to other detection tasks.

The Internet of Flying Things (IoFT) holds significant promise in fields like disaster management and surveillance. However, it is increasingly vulnerable to cyberattacks that can compromise the confidentiality, integrity, and availability (CIA) of sensitive data. Despite the growing interest in proposing Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) for IoFT networks, current literature faces key limitations, particularly the shortage of publicly available IoFT datasets with diverse attacks, and the fact that existing IDSs lack robustness against sophisticated adversarial machine learning attacks. This paper is the first study to address these limitations by proposing a more resilient and accurate IDS tailored for IoFT networks (RIDS-IoFT). We introduce a novel IDS that leverages Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to generate a hybrid dataset that combines real IoFT traffic data with GAN-generated adversarial attacks, addressing the dataset diversity issue. Additionally, we introduce an innovative adversarial training method to enhance the system’s defense against evolving threats, such as Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM), Basic Iterative Method (BIM), and Carlini & Wagner (C&W) attacks. The proposed RIDS-IoFT was evaluated using four machine learning models, Random Forest (RF), Decision Tree (DT), Support Vector Machine (SVM), and Logistic Regression (LR), on two datasets: ECU-IoFT and CICIDS2018. The IDS’s performance was assessed based on its ability to detect both traditional and adversarial attacks. The results show that the Random Forest model achieved the highest detection accuracy, up to 96.5%, demonstrating superior performance across both real and hybrid datasets. The proposed RIDS-IoFT not only enhances detection accuracy but also strengthens resilience against adversarial threats, making it suitable for resource-constrained IoFT environments. In conclusion, this study presents a comprehensive approach to securing IoFT networks by combining real and synthetic data, improving IDS robustness and accuracy against both traditional and adversarial attacks.

Adversarial attacks aim to deceive the target system. Recently, deep learning methods have become a target of adversarial attacks. Even small perturbations could lead to classification errors in deep learning models. In an intrusion detection system using deep learning method, adversarial attack can cause classification error and malicious traffic can be classified as benign. In this study, the effects of adversarial attacks on the accuracy of deep learning-based intrusion detection systems were examined. CICIDS2017 dataset was used to test the detection systems . At first, DDoS attacks weredetected using Autoencoder, MLP, AEMLP, DNN, AEDNN, CNN and AECNN methods. Then, the Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM) is used to perform adversarial attacks. Finally, the sensitivity of the methods against the adversarial attacks were examined. Our results showed that the classification performance of deep learning based detection methods decreased up to %17 after the adversarial attacks. The results obtained in this study form the basis for the validation and validation studies of learning-based intrusion detection systems.

Machine learning is one of the predominant methods used in computer science and has been widely and successfully applied in many areas such as computer vision, pattern recognition, natural language processing, cyber security etc. In cyber security, the application of machine learning algorithms for network intrusion detection system (NIDS) has seen promising results for anomaly detection mostly with the adoption of deep learning and is still growing. However, machine learning algorithms are vulnerable to adversarial attacks resulting in significant performance degradation. Adversarial attacks are security threats that aim to deceive the learning algorithm by manipulating its predictions, and Adversarial machine learning is a research area that studies both the generation and defense of such attacks. Researchers have extensively worked on the adversarial machine learning in computer vision but not many works in Intrusion detection system. However, failure in this critical Intrusion detection area could compromise the security of an entire system, and need much attention. This paper provides a review of the advancement in adversarial machine learning based intrusion detection and explores the various defense techniques applied against. Finally discuss their limitations for future research direction in this emerging area.KeywordsAdversarial attackCyber securityIntrusion detectionMachine learningDeep learningPoisoning attackEvasion attack

Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) have played an important role in protecting computer networks against illegal or unauthorized access and many cyberattacks. Given the advancement of machine learning (ML) approaches, NIDS have become more effective in detecting various complex anomalies in computer networks. However, the increasing complexity in adversarial attacks (AAs) poses a significant challenge to such systems. Cyberattacks are estimated to cost approximately $10.5 trillion annually by 2025, and this encourages researchers to improve and develop ML-based NIDS in order to address adversarial vulnerabilities in these systems to remain the systems resilient to modern attacks. In this review, we reveal the weaknesses of ML-based IDS to AAs in which many different attack techniques, such as evasion, poisoning, and generative adversarial networks (GAN) have been included. Also, this study presents and evaluates current possible defensive approaches against AAs, including but not limited to anomaly detection approaches, adversarial training, and feature selection. We also provide a comparative analysis of different ML models used in NIDS in order to further evaluate the system’s susceptibility to sophisticated AAs. A discussion on future work to improve ML-based NIDS resilience against sophisticated attacks is also given.

Intrusion detection systems (IDSs) are an essential cog of the network security suite that can defend the network from malicious intrusions and anomalous traffic. Many machine learning (ML)-based IDSs have been proposed in the literature for the detection of malicious network traffic. However, recent works have shown that ML models are vulnerable to adversarial perturbations through which an adversary can cause IDSs to malfunction by introducing a small impracticable perturbation in the network traffic. In this paper, we propose an adversarial ML attack using generative adversarial networks (GANs) that can successfully evade an ML-based IDS. We also show that GANs can be used to inoculate the IDS and make it more robust to adversarial perturbations.

The widely deployment of infrastructure and wireless interfaces increases industrial IoT (IIoT) vulnerability to network intrusions, highlighting the requirements for robust network intrusion detection systems (NIDSs). Although deep learning (DL) provides a promising solution for NIDSs, it remains susceptible to adversarial attacks as minor input perturbations can lead to major misclassifications. In this paper, we propose a packet-level adversarial traffic generation (PATG) approach for attacking NIDSs in IIoT, which not only aligns with domain constraints but also evades various DL-based NIDSs. Particularly, we introduce a reversible abstract traffic representation to ensure that the original traffic can be effectively modified while preserving its functionality. We propose a packet-level generative adversarial networks to craft adversarial traffic by learning benign data distribution in feature space and simulating evasion behaviors, which escapes the DL-based NIDSs. We further design two defense schemes to enhance system resilience against proposed adversarial attacks. We evaluate PATG on nine state-of-the-art DL-based NIDSs in the Kitsune and CICIoT23 datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that PATG can achieve a maximum evasion increase rate of 99% with cost-effective execution, while the defense methods significantly mitigate the impact of the adversarial attacks.

The number of connected IoT devices is increasing significantly due to their many benefits, including automation, improved efficiency and quality of life, and reducing waste. However, these devices have several vulnerabilities that have led to the rapid growth in the number of attacks. Therefore, several machine learning-based intrusion detection system (IDS) tools have been developed to detect intrusions and suspicious activity to and from a host (HIDS—Host IDS) or, in general, within the traffic of a network (NIDS—Network IDS). The proposed work performs a comparative analysis and an ablative study among recent machine learning-based NIDSs to develop a benchmark of the different proposed strategies. The proposed work compares both shallow learning algorithms, such as decision trees, random forests, Naïve Bayes, logistic regression, XGBoost, and support vector machines, and deep learning algorithms, such as DNNs, CNNs, and LSTM, whose approach is relatively new in the literature. Also, the ensembles are tested. The algorithms are evaluated on the KDD-99, NSL-KDD, UNSW-NB15, IoT-23, and UNB-CIC IoT 2023 datasets. The results show that the NIDS tools based on deep learning approaches achieve better performance in detecting network anomalies than shallow learning approaches, and ensembles outperform all the other models.

Smart grids represent the modernization of electrical grids by integrating advanced communication and information technology. However, their interconnected nature and reliance on digital infrastructure make them vulnerable to cyber-attacks. Enhancing cybersecurity in smart grids is paramount to ensure reliability and safety. This paper explores the use of Machine Learning-Based Intrusion Detection Systems (ML-IDS) as a solution to enhance the cybersecurity of smart grids. It examines the current cybersecurity challenges in smart grids, the fundamentals of intrusion detection systems, the integration of machine learning in IDS, and the effectiveness of ML-IDS in mitigating cyber threats.