Investigating Resistance of Deep Learning-based IDS against Adversaries using min-max Optimization

With the growth of adversarial attacks against machine learning models, several concerns have emerged about potential vulnerabilities in designing deep neural network-based intrusion detection systems (IDS). In this paper, we study the resilience of deep learning-based intrusion detection systems against adversarial attacks. We apply the min-max (or saddle-point) approach to train intrusion detection systems against adversarial attack samples in UNSW-NB 15 dataset. We have the max approach for generating adversarial samples that achieves maximum loss and attack deep neural networks. On the other side, we utilize the existing min approach [1] [2] as a defense strategy to optimize intrusion detection systems that minimize the loss of the incorporated adversarial samples during the adversarial training. We study and measure the effectiveness of the adversarial attack methods as well as the resistance of the adversarially trained models against such attacks. We find that the adversarial attack methods that were designed in binary domains can be used in continuous domains and exhibit different misclassification levels. We finally show that principal component analysis (PCA) based feature reduction can boost the robustness in intrusion detection system (IDS) using a deep neural network (DNN).