Adversarial Machine Learning for Network Intrusion Detection Systems: A Comprehensive Survey

Network-based Intrusion Detection System (NIDS) forms the frontline defence against network attacks that compromise the security of the data, systems, and networks. In recent years, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have been increasingly used in NIDS to detect malicious traffic due to their high detection accuracy. However, DNNs are vulnerable to adversarial attacks that modify an input example with imperceivable perturbation, which causes a misclassification by the DNN. In security-sensitive domains, such as NIDS, adversarial attacks pose a severe threat to network security. However, existing studies in adversarial learning against NIDS directly implement adversarial attacks designed for Computer Vision (CV) tasks, ignoring the fundamental differences in the detection pipeline and feature spaces between CV and NIDS. It remains a major research challenge to launch and detect adversarial attacks against NIDS. This article surveys the recent literature on NIDS, adversarial attacks, and network defences since 2015 to examine the differences in adversarial learning against deep neural networks in CV and NIDS. It provides the reader with a thorough understanding of DL-based NIDS, adversarial attacks and defences, and research trends in this field. We first present a taxonomy of DL-based NIDS and discuss the impact of taxonomy on adversarial learning. Next, we review existing white-box and black-box adversarial attacks on DNNs and their applicability in the NIDS domain. Finally, we review existing defence mechanisms against adversarial examples and their characteristics.