Deep Learning for Detecting Network Attacks: An End-to-End Approach

Network attack is still a major security concern for organizations worldwide. Recently, researchers have started to apply neural networks to detect network attacks by leveraging network traffic data. However, public network data sets have major drawbacks such as limited data sample variations and unbalanced data with respect to malicious and benign samples. In this paper, we present a new end-to-end approach to automatically generate high-quality network data using protocol fuzzing, and train the deep learning models using the fuzzed data to detect the network attacks that exploit the logic flaws within the network protocols. Our findings show that fuzzing generates data samples that cover real-world data and deep learning models trained with fuzzed data can successfully detect real network attacks.