README.md

TDSC_ERNN

ERNN: Error-Resilient RNN for Encrypted Traffic Detection towards Network-Induced Phenomena

ERNN is a robust and end-to-end RNN model designed specifically for cybersecurity detection systems (IDS and Malware) to alleviate misclassifications introduced by network-induced phenomena, such as packet loss, retransmission, and out-of-order.

Network-Induced Phenomena

We consider three main network-induced phenomena.

(i) Packet loss: It refers to the server-side lost some packets sent from the client-side.

(ii) Retransmission: It refers to the client repeatedly sending a series of packets for the integrity of the transmission.

(iii) Out-of-order: It means that the packet received by the server is not in the same sequence as the one sent by the client.

Testbed Dataplane

Hardware:

• 40 GbE NIC: DPDK-supported hardwares
  • e.g., Intel XL710-QDA2

Software:

• Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS
• Python 3.7
• DPDK 20.11
• Pktgen 20.03.0

Usage:

• Install DPDK 20.11 following Getting Started Guide for Linux.
• Compile DPDK applications.
• Use pdump to capture packets

   ./dpdk-pdump -- --pdump 'port=0,queue=*,rx-dev=/tmp/rx.pcap,tx-dev=/tmp/tx.pcap,ring-size=65536' --pdump 'port=1,queue=*,rx-dev=/tmp/rx2.pcap,ring-size=65536'
  

• Use Pktgen to send packets

   ./pktgen -l 0-4 -n 4 -- -P -m [1].0 -m [2].1 -m [3].2 -m [4].3 -s 0:./demo.pcap -s 1:./demo.pcap -s 2:./demo.pcap -s 3:./demo.pcap
  

• Please configure the destination MAC address and destination IP address in the Pktgen interface, e.g.,

Utilizing the data plane can capture real-world packets of network-induced phenomena.

Requirements

pip install scipy
pip install numpy
pip install pandas
pip install tqdm
pip install pyecharts
pip install joblib
pip install pickle
pip install sklearn
pip install captum

Example Dataset

If the user does not run on the data plane, it could also simulate packet loss, retransmission, and out-of-order in offline.

The specific generation process leverages the scapy library to manipulate the packets from PCAP files.

The folder ./data_demo/ stores test demo data including normal labels and inputs, as well as problematic packets with 7 combinations.

Running

The ./code/ernn.py stores the model architecture of ERNN.

Training the model, please set the transition matrix Fm.

python train.py

Test the demo dataset with trained models where in ./code/model_para_eval/. Specifically, the "1.0+1.0.pth" refers to typical LSTM and others are ERNN.

python test.py

Using the Integrated Gradients method from Captum to interpret the model inference.

python interp.py

Interpretability

The attribution matrix generation refers to the Integrated Gradients method from Captum.

The attribution matrix is equal to the input size and records the influence degree of each position in the input for the inference result. It can help us understand the dependency dispersion effect of ERNN.

References

• Optimized Invariant Representation of Network Traffic for Detecting Unseen Malware Variants, Karel Bartos, Michal Sofka, and Vojtech Franc - USENIX Security 2016
• Kitsune: An Ensemble of Autoencoders for Online Network Intrusion Detection, Yisroel Mirsky, Tomer Doitshman, Yuval Elovici, and Asaf Shabtai - NDSS 2018
• FS-Net: A Flow Sequence Network For Encrypted Traffic Classification, Chang Liu, Longtao He, Gang Xiong, Zigang Cao, and Zhen Li - INFOCOM 2019
• Combining supervised and unsupervised learning for zero-day malware detection, Prakash Mandayam Comar, Lei Liu, Sabyasachi Saha, Pang-Ning Tan, and Antonio Nucci - INFOCOM 2013
• MaMPF: Encrypted Traffic Classification Based on Multi-Attribute Markov Probability Fingerprints, Chang Liu, Zigang Cao, Gang Xiong, Gaopeng Gou, Siu-Ming Yiu, and Longtao He - IWQoS 2018
• Realtime Robust Malicious Traffic Detection via Frequency Domain Analysis, Chuanpu Fu, Qi Li, Meng Shen, and Ke Xu - CCS 2021