Intelligent Unsupervised Network Traffic Classification Method Using Adversarial Training and Deep Clustering for Secure Internet of Things

Weijie Zhang (), Lanping Zhang, Xixi Zhang (), Yu Wang, Pengfei Liu and Guan Gui
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Weijie Zhang: Reading Academy, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing 210044, China
Lanping Zhang: College of Telecommunications and Information Engineering, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Nanjing 210003, China
Xixi Zhang: College of Telecommunications and Information Engineering, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Nanjing 210003, China
Yu Wang: College of Telecommunications and Information Engineering, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Nanjing 210003, China
Pengfei Liu: College of Telecommunications and Information Engineering, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Nanjing 210003, China
Guan Gui: College of Telecommunications and Information Engineering, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Nanjing 210003, China

Future Internet, 2023, vol. 15, issue 9, 1-20

Abstract: Network traffic classification (NTC) has attracted great attention in many applications such as secure communications, intrusion detection systems. The existing NTC methods based on supervised learning rely on sufficient labeled datasets in the training phase, but for most traffic datasets, it is difficult to obtain label information in practical applications. Although unsupervised learning does not rely on labels, its classification accuracy is not high, and the number of data classes is difficult to determine. This paper proposes an unsupervised NTC method based on adversarial training and deep clustering with improved network traffic classification (NTC) and lower computational complexity in comparison with the traditional clustering algorithms. Here, the training process does not require data labels, which greatly reduce the computational complexity of the network traffic classification through pretraining. In the pretraining stage, an autoencoder (AE) is used to reduce the dimension of features and reduce the complexity of the initial high-dimensional network traffic data features. Moreover, we employ the adversarial training model and a deep clustering structure to further optimize the extracted features. The experimental results show that our proposed method has robust performance, with a multiclassification accuracy of 92.2%, which is suitable for classification with a large number of unlabeled data in actual application scenarios. This paper only focuses on breakthroughs in the algorithm stage, and future work can be focused on the deployment and adaptation in practical environments.

Keywords: network traffic classification; convolutional adversarial autoencoder; Internet of things; unsupervised learning; deep clustering (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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