Netinfo Security ›› 2023, Vol. 23 ›› Issue (7): 74-85.doi: 10.3969/j.issn.1671-1122.2023.07.008

Previous Articles     Next Articles

Explainable Anomaly Traffic Detection Based on Sparse Autoencoders

LIU Yuxiao, CHEN Wei(), ZHANG Tianyue, WU Lifa   

  1. School of Computer Science, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Nanjing 210023, China
  • Received:2022-12-20 Online:2023-07-10 Published:2023-07-14

Abstract:

Although many deep learning detection models achieve good results in various indicators, security managers do not understand the decision-making basis of deep models, on the one hand, they cannot trust the discrimination results of the model, and on the other hand, they cannot diagnose and track the errors of the model well, which greatly limit the practical application of deep learning models in this field. Faced with such a problem, this paper proposed a Sparse Autoencoder Based Anomaly Traffic Detection (SAE-ATD). The model used the sparse autoencoder to learn the normal traffic characteristics, and on this basis, a threshold was introduced to iteratively select the best threshold to improve the detection rate of the model. After the model was predicted, the outliers in the prediction results were fed into the explainer, and after iteratively updating the reference values through the explainer, the difference between each feature reference value and the outlier was returned, and interpretability analysis was carried out in combination with the original data. In this paper, experiments are carried out on the CICIDS2017 dataset and the CIRA-CIC-DoHBrw-2020 dataset, and the experimental results show that SAE-ATD has 99% accuracy and recall for most attacks detection on the two datasets, and can also provide explainability for the model.

Key words: anomaly traffic detection, autoencoder, deep learning, explainability

CLC Number: