Ensemble adversarial training based defense against adversarial attacks for machine learning-based intrusion detection system

In this paper, a defence mechanism is proposed against adversarial attacks. The defence is based on an ensemble classifier that is adversarially trained. This is accomplished by generating adversarial attacks from four different attack methods, i.e., Jacobian-based saliency map attack (JSMA), projected gradient descent (PGD), momentum iterative method (MIM), and fast gradient signed method (FGSM). The adversarial examples are used to identify the robust machine-learning algorithms which eventually participate in the ensemble. The adversarial attacks are divided into seen and unseen attacks. To validate our work, the experiments are conducted using NSLKDD, UNSW-NB15 and CICIDS17 datasets. Grid search for the ensemble is used to optimise results. The parameter used for performance evaluations is accuracy, F1 score and AUC score. It is shown that an adversarially trained ensemble classifier produces better results.