Adversarial Attacks on AI based Intrusion Detection System for Heterogeneous Wireless Communications Networks

It has been recognized that artificial intelligence (AI) will play an important role in future societies. AI has already been incorporated in many industries to improve business processes and automation. Although the aviation industry has successfully implemented flight management systems or autopilot to automate flight operations, it is expected that full embracement of AI remains a challenge. Given the rigorous validation process and the requirements for the highest level of safety standards and risk management, AI needs to prove itself being safe to operate. This paper addresses the safety issues of AI deployment in an aviation network compatible with the Future Communication Infrastructure that utilizes heterogeneous wireless access technologies for communications between the aircraft and the ground networks. It further considers the exploitation of software defined networking (SDN) technologies in the ground network while the adoption of SDN in the airborne network can be optional. Due to the nature of centralized management in SDN-based network, the SDN controller can become a single point of failure or a target for cyber attacks. To countermeasure such attacks, an intrusion detection system utilises AI techniques, more specifically deep neural network (DNN), is considered. However, an adversary can target the AI-based intrusion detection system. This paper examines the impact of AI security attacks on the performance of the DNN algorithm. Poisoning attacks targeting the DSL-KDD datasets which were used to train the DNN algorithm were launched at the intrusion detection system. Results showed that the performance of the DNN algorithm has been significantly degraded in terms of the mean square error, accuracy rate, precision rate and the recall rate.