PGAN:A Generative Adversarial Network based Anomaly Detection Method for Network Intrusion Detection System

With the rapid development of communication network, the types and quantities of network traffic data have increased substantially. What followed was the frequent occurrence of versatile cyber attacks. As an important part of network security, the network-based intrusion detection system (NIDS) can monitor and protect the network equippments and terminals in real time. The traditional detection methods based on deep learning (DL) are always in supervised manners in NIDS, which can automatically build end-to-end detection model without manual feature extraction and selection by domain experts. However, supervised learning methods require large-scale labeled data, yet capturing large labeled datasets is a very cubersome, tedious and time-consuming manual task. Instead, unsupervised learning is an effective way to overcome this problem. Nonetheless, the existing unsupervised methods are prone to low detection efficiency and are difficult to train. In this paper we propose a novel NIDS method called PGAN based on generative adversarial network (GAN) to detect the abnormal traffic from the perspective of Anomaly Detection, which leverage the competitive speciality of adversarial training to learn the normal traffic. Based on the public dataset CICIDS2017, three experimental results show that PGAN can significantly outperform other unsupervised methods like stacked autoencoder (SAE) and isolation forest (IF).