Semi-Supervised Learning for Anomaly Traffic Detection via Bidirectional Normalizing Flows

Abstract

With the rapid development of the Internet, various types of anomaly traffic are threatening network security. However, the difficulty of collecting and labelling anomalous traffic is a significant challenge, so this paper proposes a semi-supervised anomaly detection framework. Considering normal and abnormal traffic have different data distributions, our framework can generate pseudo anomaly samples without prior knowledge of anomalies to achieve the detection of anomaly data. The framework comprises three principal components. Firstly, a pre-trained feature extractor is employed to extract a feature representation of the network traffic. Secondly, a bidirectional normalizing flow module establishes a reversible transformation between the latent data distribution and a Gaussian space. Through this bidirectional mapping, samples first undergo transformation manipulation within the Gaussian distribution space, and are then transported through the generative direction of normalizing flows, translating mathematical transformations into semantic feature evolutions in the latent data space. Finally, a simple classifier explicitly learns the potential differences between anomaly and normal samples to facilitate better anomaly detection. During inference, our framework requires only two modules to detect anomalous samples, leading to a considerable reduction in model size. According to the experiments, our method achieves the state-of-the-art results on the common benchmarking datasets of anomaly network traffic detection. Furthermore, it exhibits good generalisation performance across datasets.