SDOoop: Capturing Periodical Patterns and Out-of-phase Anomalies in Streaming Data Analysis

Streaming data analysis is increasingly required in applications, e.g., IoT, cybersecurity, robotics, mechatronics or cyber-physical systems. Despite its relevance, it is still an emerging field with open challenges. SDO is a recent anomaly detection method designed to meet requirements of speed, interpretability and intuitive parameterization. In this work, we present SDOoop, which extends the capabilities of SDO's streaming version to retain temporal information of data structures. SDOoop spots contextual anomalies undetectable by traditional algorithms, while enabling the inspection of data geometries, clusters and temporal patterns. We used SDOoop to model real network communications in critical infrastructures and extract patterns that disclose their dynamics. Moreover, we evaluated SDOoop with data from intrusion detection and natural science domains and obtained performances equivalent or superior to state-of-the-art approaches. Our results show the high potential of new model-based methods to analyze and explain streaming data. Since SDOoop operates with constant per-sample space and time complexity, it is ideal for big data, being able to instantly process large volumes of information. SDOoop conforms to next-generation machine learning, which, in addition to accuracy and speed, is expected to provide highly interpretable and informative models.

Explainability and Adversarial Robustness for RNNs

Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) yield attractive properties for constructing Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) for network data. With the rise of ubiquitous Machine Learning (ML) systems, malicious actors have been catching up quickly to find new ways to exploit ML vulnerabilities for profit. Recently developed adversarial ML techniques focus on computer vision and their applicability to network traffic is not straightforward: Network packets expose fewer features than an image, are sequential and impose several constraints on their features. We show that despite these completely different characteristics, adversarial samples can be generated reliably for RNNs. To understand a classifier's potential for misclassification, we extend existing explainability techniques and propose new ones, suitable particularly for sequential data. Applying them shows that already the first packets of a communication flow are of crucial importance and are likely to be targeted by attackers. Feature importance methods show that even relatively unimportant features can be effectively abused to generate adversarial samples. Since traditional evaluation metrics such as accuracy are not sufficient for quantifying the adversarial threat, we propose the Adversarial Robustness Score (ARS) for comparing IDSs, capturing a common notion of adversarial robustness, and show that an adversarial training procedure can significantly and successfully reduce the attack surface.

Walling up Backdoors in Intrusion Detection Systems

Interest in poisoning attacks and backdoors recently resurfaced for Deep Learning (DL) applications. Several successful defense mechanisms have been recently proposed for Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), for example in the context of autonomous driving. We show that visualization approaches can aid in identifying a backdoor independent of the used classifier. Surprisingly, we find that common defense mechanisms fail utterly to remove backdoors in DL for Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs). Finally, we devise pruning-based approaches to remove backdoors for Decision Trees (DTs) and Random Forests (RFs) and demonstrate their effectiveness for two different network security datasets.