Hybrid unsupervised web-attack detection and classification – A deep learning approach

Abstract

Web requests made by users of web applications are manipulated by hackers to gain control of web servers. Moreover, detecting web attacks has been increasingly important in the distribution of information over the last few decades. Also, several existing techniques had been performed on detecting vulnerable web attacks using machine learning and deep learning techniques. However, there is a lack in achieving attack detection ratio owing to the utilization of supervised and semi-supervised learning approaches. Thus to overcome the aforementioned issues, this research proposes a hybrid unsupervised detection model a deep learning-based anomaly-based web attack detection. Whereas, the encoded outputs of De-Noising Autoencoder (DAE), as well as Stacked Autoencoder (SAE), are integrated and given to the Generative adversarial network (GAN) as input to improve the feature representation ability to detect the web attacks. Consequently, for classifying the type of attacks, a novel DBM-Bi LSTM-based classification model has been introduced. Which incorporates DBM for binary classification and Bi-LSTM for multi-class classification to classify the various attacks. Finally, the performance of the classifier in terms of recall, precision, F1-Score, and accuracy are evaluated and compared. The proposed method achieved high accuracy of 98%.