Network Intrusion Detection via Flow-to-Image Conversion and Vision Transformer Classification

In recent years, computer networks have become an indispensable part of our life, and these networks are vulnerable to various type of network attacks, compromising the security of our data and the freedom of our communications. In this paper, we propose a new intrusion detection method that uses image conversion from network data flow to produce an RGB image that can be classified using advanced deep learning models. In this method, we proposed to use the decision tree algorithm to identify the important features, and a windowing and overlapping mechanism to convert the varying input size to a standard size image for the classifier. We then use a Vision Transfomer (ViT) classifier to classify the resulting image. Our experimental results show that we can achieve 98.5% accuracy in binary classification on the CIC IDS2017 dataset, and 96.3% on the UNSW-NB15 dataset, which is 8.09% higher than the next best algorithm, the Deep Belief Network with Improved Kernel-Based Extreme Learning (DBN-KELM) method. For multi-class classification, our proposed method can achieve a testing accuracy of 96.4%, which is 5.6% higher than the next best method, the DBN-KELM.