Network Intrusion Detection Based on Supervised Adversarial Variational Auto-Encoder With Regularization

To explore the advantages of adversarial learning and deep learning, we propose a novel network intrusion detection model called SAVAER-DNN, which can not only detect known and unknown attacks but also improve the detection rate of low-frequent attacks. SAVAER is a supervised variational auto-encoder with regularization, which uses WGAN-GP instead of the vanilla GAN to learn the latent distribution of the original data. SAVAER's decoder is used to synthesize samples of low-frequent and unknown attacks, thereby increasing the diversity of training samples and balancing the training data set. SAVAER's encoder is used to initialize the weights of the hidden layers of the DNN and explore high-level feature representations of the original samples. The benchmark NSL-KDD (KDDTest+), NSL-KDD (KDDTest-21) and UNSW-NB15 datasets are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed model. The experimental results show that the proposed SAVAER-DNN is more suitable for data augmentation than the other three well-known data oversampling methods. Moreover, the proposed SAVAER-DNN outperforms eight well-known classification models in detection performance and is more effective in detecting low-frequent and unknown attacks. Furthermore, compared with other state-of-the-art intrusion detection models reported in the IDS literature, the proposed SAVAER-DNN offers better performance in terms of overall accuracy, detection rate, F1 score, and false positive rate.