A Novel Way to Generate Adversarial Network Traffic Samples against Network Traffic Classification

Network traffic classification technologies could be used by attackers to implement network monitoring and then launch traffic analysis attacks or website fingerprint attacks. In order to prevent such attacks, a novel way to generate adversarial samples of network traffic from the perspective of the defender is proposed. By adding perturbation to the normal network traffic, a kind of adversarial network traffic is formed, which will cause misclassification when the attackers are implementing network traffic classification with deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) as a classification model. The paper uses the concept of adversarial samples in image recognition for reference to the field of network traffic classification and chooses several different methods to generate adversarial samples of network traffic. The experiment, in which the LeNet-5 CNN is selected as a classification model used by attackers and Vgg16 CNN is selected as the model to test the transferability of the adversarial network traffic generated, shows the effect of the adversarial network traffic samples.