Transformer-based Network Anomaly Detection System for Intelligent Cyber Security Monitoring
Abstract
As MNI becomes increasingly vulnerable to new kinds of attacks from the cyber world, accurate and timely detection of intrusions becomes a primary key to the power of cybersecurity. More complex attack patterns, complex traffic interactions within large scales are not very collaborable with the typical signature-based detection methods. A Transformer Based Network Anomaly Detection System for intelligent cyber security monitoring based on network flow analysis (NFAs) is proposed in the paper. This framework is derived from the CICIDS2017 data-set and proposes 78 of the statistical flow characteristics, where each flow characteristic impacts the behaviour of a packet, protocol, volume of traffic and temporal communication pattern. The model uses a Transformer Encoder network architecture along with multiple heads of self-attention, which provides greater understanding to deal with complex relationships between features from network traffic. LabelEncoder and StandardScaler have been applied to the columns with values that need to be encoded for categorical variables and scaled to fit the values for models training. A trained model is then applied to progress multiple different categories of cyberattacks including DDoS attacks, PortScan, Brute Force, Botnet, Web Based, etc. and different kinds of traffic, all traffic is considered benign traffic. For providing real-time predictions, confidence interval, prediction of class severity and alerts using trained model an API developed on flask to connect the trained model to a dashboard was built. The experimental results show that the Transformer-based learning could be very effective in achieving successful capturing of the network behavior and conducting realistic detection. The overall proposed system offers an intelligent, scalable and deployment-centric approach to improve the monitoring and proactive detection of threats in contemporary networks in the field of cybersecurity.