Efficient Early Anomaly Detection of Network Security Attacks Using Deep Learning

We present a deep-learning (DL) anomaly-based Intrusion Detection System (IDS) for networked systems, which is able to detect in realtime anomalous network traffic corresponding to security attacks while they are ongoing. Compared to similar approaches, our IDS does not require a fixed number of network packets to analyze in order to make a decision on the type of traffic and it utilizes a more compact neural network which improves its realtime performance. As shown in the experiments using the CICIDS2017 and USTC-TFC-2016 datasets, the approach is able to detect anomalous traffic with high precision and recall. In addition, the approach is able to classify the network traffic by using only a very small portion of the network flows.