Packet Preprocessing in CNN-Based Network Intrusion Detection System

Abstract

The proliferation of various connected platforms, including Internet of things, industrial control systems (ICSs), connected cars, and in-vehicle networks, has resulted in the simultaneous use of multiple protocols and devices. Chaotic situations caused by the usage of different protocols and various types of devices, such as heterogeneous networks, implemented differently by vendors renders the adoption of a flexible security solution difficult, such as recent deep learning-based intrusion detection system (IDS) studies. These studies optimized the deep learning model for their environment to improve performance, but the basic principle of the deep learning model used was not changed, so this can be called a next-generation IDS with a model that has little or no requirements. Some studies proposed IDS based on unsupervised learning technology that does not require labeled data. However, not using available assets, such as network packet data, is a waste of resources. If the security solution considers the role and importance of the devices constituting the network and the security area of the protocol standard by experts, the assets can be well used, but it will no longer be flexible. Most deep learning model-based IDS studies used recurrent neural network (RNN), which is a supervised learning model, because the characteristics of the RNN model, especially when the long-short term memory (LSTM) is incorporated, are better configured to reflect the flow of the packet data stream over time, and thus perform better than other supervised learning models such as convolutional neural network (CNN). However, if the input data induce the CNN’s kernel to sufficiently reflect the network characteristics through proper preprocessing, it could perform better than other deep learning models in the network IDS. Hence, we propose the first preprocessing method, called “direct”, for network IDS that can use the characteristics of the kernel by using the minimum protocol information, field size, and offset. In addition to direct, we propose two more preprocessing techniques called “weighted” and “compressed”. Each requires additional network information; therefore, direct conversion was compared with related studies. Including direct, the proposed preprocessing methods are based on field-to-pixel philosophy, which can reflect the advantages of CNN by extracting the convolutional features of each pixel. Direct is the most intuitive method of applying field-to-pixel conversion to reflect an image’s convolutional characteristics in the CNN. Weighted and compressed are conversion methods used to evaluate the direct method. Consequently, the IDS constructed using a CNN with the proposed direct preprocessing method demonstrated meaningful performance in the NSL-KDD dataset.