Adversarially Robust 1D-CNN for Malicious Traffic Detection in Network Security Applications

Baraa Mohammed Hassn¹, Esraa Saleh Alomari¹, Jaafar Sadiq Alrubaye¹ , Oday Ali Hassen²^,*

¹Computer Department, College of Education for Pure Sciences, Wasit University, 52001 Al-Kut, Wasit, Iraq

²Ministry of Education, Wasit Education Directorate, Kut 52001, Iraq

Email: bhassan@uowasit.edu.iq; ealomari@uowasit.edu.iq; jsadiq@uowasit.edu.iq; odayali@uowasit.edu.iq

Abstract

While threats in cyberspace are in a state of constant evolution, the use of AI in cyber defense has numerous opportunities and dangers. This paper evaluates adversarial robustness for deep learning networks in network security applications by introducing a novel one-dimensional CNN model for malicious traffic detection. We conducted rigorous end-to-end processing and analysis of network traffic data, using a balanced dataset of 200,000 connections (46.52% benign, 53.48% malicious). Our model architecture includes three convolutional blocks (32, 64, and 128 filters, respectively) with batch normalization and dropout mechanisms (0.3 and 0.2, respectively). We use standardized feature scaling, label encoding for categorical features, and stratified sampling to maintain class distribution integrity. Our proposed approach achieved remarkable performance metrics compared to standard approaches with a 95% AUC-ROC result (15% better than baseline CNN models) and detection rate of 99.99% malicious traffic (compared to 98.5% with standard architectures). The model demonstrates better robustness with only 10 false negatives out of 107,895 malicious samples, a 67% enhancement compared to current state-of-the-art systems. Training dynamics show great stability with minimal overfitting (validation/training loss difference of only 0.01), indicating good generalization ability.

Keywords: Network Security; Cybersecurity Defense; Malicious Traffic Detection; Intrusion Detection Systems; Deep Learning; Convolutional Neural Networks; Feature Importance Analysis; Adversarial Machine Learning