GSA-DT: A Malicious Traffic Detection Model Based on Graph Self-Attention Network and Decision Tree

Malicious attack has shown a rapid growth in recent years, it is very important to accurately detect malicious traffic to defend against malicious attacks. Compared with machine learning and deep learning technologies, graph convolutional neural network (GCN) achieves better detection results of malicious traffic due to additional consideration of the correlation between network traffic features. However, existing GCN-based detection models suffer from fixed weight assignment, only focusing on local features, lack the ability to model graph structure and relationships as well as having gradient disappearance. To solve these problems, this paper proposes the GSA-DT model based on graph self-attention network and decision tree. GSA-DT first preprocesses the original network traffic to obtain better traffic features and labels, and then uses GCN to extract the topological structure of network traffic as well as capture the correlation relationships among traffic features, where the ReLU activation function is replaced by LeakyReLU to overcome the problems of neuron “death” and gradient disappearance during the training process; It also introduces the self-attention mechanism into GCN to assign larger weights to the key features to reduce the interference of redundant features. Finally, GSA-DT uses decision tree to perform the detection of malicious traffic. Experimental results on four network traffic datasets show that GSA-DT model improves the detection accuracy over 1% on average than seven advanced malicious traffic detection models, and it also performs better in F1-measure, TPR, FPR as well as stability.