Adapting to the Evolution: Enhancing Intrusion Detection Through Machine Learning in the QUIC Protocol Era

Abstract

The advent of the QUIC protocol may herald a significant shift in the composition of online traffic in the years to come. The transport layer encryption of the QUIC protocol is one of its main evolutions, especially for metadata that was previously transmitted over TCP traffic without encryption. This new protocol has the potential to require significant alterations in future Internet traffic analysis methods and impact network intrusion detection. On the other side, Machine learning has been used in several research projects to identify network intrusions, with positive outcomes. However, we must take into account new evolution of network traffic. In this paper, we propose a new approach that employs supervised machine learning algorithms to identify flows generated by bots interacting with a Web server during a DDoS attack, focusing on the challenges posed by the QUIC protocol and its implications for effective intrusion detection and cybersecurity. Our contribution in this work is divided into three main parts: 1) A guided process with model architecture for emulating and collecting traffic that depict a range of situations our system may encounter; 2) an analysis module that consists on the creation of two labeled datasets, where observations represent the traffic flows detected in PCAP files. We studied the relevance of different features for these datasets, contributing to a thorough understanding of the quality of the data used; 3) a real world experimention for evaluating the effectiveness of several supervised machine learning algorithms on our datasets. This experimentation allows us to determine which algorithm provides the best prediction results.