Review on the Feasibility of Adversarial Evasion Attacks and Defenses for Network Intrusion Detection Systems

Nowadays, numerous applications incorporate machine learning (ML) algorithms due to their prominent achievements. However, many studies in the field of computer vision have shown that ML can be fooled by intentionally crafted instances, called adversarial examples. These adversarial examples take advantage of the intrinsic vulnerability of ML models. Recent research raises many concerns in the cybersecurity field. An increasing number of researchers are studying the feasibility of such attacks on security systems based on ML algorithms, such as Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS). The feasibility of such adversarial attacks would be influenced by various domain-specific constraints. This can potentially increase the difficulty of crafting adversarial examples. Despite the considerable amount of research that has been done in this area, much of it focuses on showing that it is possible to fool a model using features extracted from the raw data but does not address the practical side, i.e., the reverse transformation from theory to practice. For this reason, we propose a review browsing through various important papers to provide a comprehensive analysis. Our analysis highlights some challenges that have not been addressed in the reviewed papers.

Adv-Bot: Realistic Adversarial Botnet Attacks against Network Intrusion Detection Systems

Due to the numerous advantages of machine learning (ML) algorithms, many applications now incorporate them. However, many studies in the field of image classification have shown that MLs can be fooled by a variety of adversarial attacks. These attacks take advantage of ML algorithms' inherent vulnerability. This raises many questions in the cybersecurity field, where a growing number of researchers are recently investigating the feasibility of such attacks against machine learning-based security systems, such as intrusion detection systems. The majority of this research demonstrates that it is possible to fool a model using features extracted from a raw data source, but it does not take into account the real implementation of such attacks, i.e., the reverse transformation from theory to practice. The real implementation of these adversarial attacks would be influenced by various constraints that would make their execution more difficult. As a result, the purpose of this study was to investigate the actual feasibility of adversarial attacks, specifically evasion attacks, against network-based intrusion detection systems (NIDS), demonstrating that it is entirely possible to fool these ML-based IDSs using our proposed adversarial algorithm while assuming as many constraints as possible in a black-box setting. In addition, since it is critical to design defense mechanisms to protect ML-based IDSs against such attacks, a defensive scheme is presented. Realistic botnet traffic traces are used to assess this work. Our goal is to create adversarial botnet traffic that can avoid detection while still performing all of its intended malicious functionality.