SYN-GAN: A robust intrusion detection system using GAN-based synthetic data for IoT security

Abstract

As technological communication progresses, diverse datasets are exchanged across distributed environments using the Internet of Things (IoT). However, the IoT environment is vulnerable to attacking and breaching data privacy or making a robust system worse by providing attack data. To address potential risks of attacks, researchers have been conducting experiments on network intrusion detection systems (NIDS) to mitigate threats effectively. The issue of data imbalance and associated data collection costs persists, hindering the ability of machine learning (ML) models to learn malicious behaviour effectively and consequently impacting the accuracy of network threat detection. Addressing these issues, our study explores the potential of using 100% synthetic data generated via Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) for training ML models in Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS). This approach reduces the dependency on real-world data significantly, paving the way for a more flexible and ethically convenient model-building process. For the UNSW-NB15 dataset, we achieved an accuracy of 90%, a precision of 91%, a recall of 90%, and an F1 score of 89%. For the NSL-KDD dataset, our results showed an accuracy of 84%, a precision of 85%, a recall of 84%, and an F1 score of 84%. For the BoT-IoT dataset, we attained perfect scores of 100% across all metrics. These outcomes indicate that the values obtained from our analysis demonstrate high performance, yielding comparative or superior results to previous studies. Therefore, our study successfully replicates real-world network intrusion detection data, showing new opportunities for the use of generative data in cyber security.