Generative Adversarial Networks for Hardening Cloud Intrusion Detection Systems

Abstract

Cloud computing has emerged as an important core to the contemporary digital services, facilitating scalable, on demand provisioning of resources across a variety of application fields. Nevertheless, this multi-tenant and dynamic environment of clouds and the amplified attack surface make the detection of intrusions through reliable methods a consistent issue that cloud security systems struggle with. The proposed work is a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN)-based hardening framework of cloud intrusion detection systems, targeting better resilience to changing and low-rate cyberattacks. The methodology combines a conditional generator which is used to generate realistic cloud-specific attack traffic, a discriminator used to refine the adversarial traffic, as well as a co-trained intrusion classifier trained on both clean and synthetic data in a closed-loop way. The feature-aware regularization is introduced to maintain the statistical consistency of network traffic, and optimize the attack diversity. The proposed approach is proved to yield better results in comparison with signature-based, machine learning, deep learning, and adversarial ML-based IDS models by experimental assessment. Significant gains in the accuracy of identifying, the ability to recall, stability, and minimizing errors are also noticed with quantifiable increases observed in all evaluation measures. These findings represent the usefulness of adversarial data-driven learning to develop robust, adaptive, and future-ready cloud intrusion detection systems.