text: Adversarial attacks have been widely studied in the field of computer vision but their impact on network security applications remains an area of open research. As IoT, 5G and AI continue to converge to realize the promise of the fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0), security incidents and events on IoT networks have increased. Deep learning techniques are being applied to detect and mitigate many of such security threats against IoT networks. Feedforward Neural Networks (FNN) have been widely used for classifying intrusion attacks in IoT networks. In this paper, we consider a variant of the FNN known as the Self-normalizing Neural Network (SNN) and compare its performance with the FNN for classifying intrusion attacks in an IoT network. Our analysis is performed using the BoT-IoT dataset from the Cyber Range Lab of the center of UNSW Canberra Cyber. In our experimental results, the FNN outperforms the SNN for intrusion detection in IoT networks based on multiple performance metrics such as accuracy, precision, and recall as well as multi-classification metrics such as Cohen's Kappa score. However, when tested for adversarial robustness, the SNN demonstrates better resilience against the adversarial samples from the IoT dataset, presenting a promising future in the quest for safer and more secure deep learning in IoT networks.
  @cite_1: Intrusion detection systems define an important and dynamic research area for cybersecurity. The role of Intrusion Detection System within security architecture is to improve a security level by identification of all malicious and also suspicious events that could be observed in computer or network system. One of the more specific research areas related to intrusion detection is anomaly detection. Anomaly-based intrusion detection in networks refers to the problem of finding untypical events in the observed network traffic that do not conform to the expected normal patterns. It is assumed that everything that is untypical anomalous could be dangerous and related to some security events. To detect anomalies many security systems implements a classification or clustering algorithms. However, recent research proved that machine learning models might misclassify adversarial events, e.g. observations which were created by applying intentionally non-random perturbations to the dataset. Such weakness could increase of false negative rate which implies undetected attacks. This fact can lead to one of the most dangerous vulnerabilities of intrusion detection systems. The goal of the research performed was verification of the anomaly detection systems ability to resist this type of attack. This paper presents the preliminary results of tests taken to investigate existence of attack vector, which can use adversarial examples to conceal a real attack from being detected by intrusion detection systems.
  @cite_4: Deep neural networks have demonstrated their effectiveness in most machine learning tasks, with intrusion detection included. Unfortunately, recent research found that deep neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial examples in the image classification domain, i.e., they leave some opportunities for an attacker to fool the networks into misclassification by introducing imperceptible changes to the original pixels in an image. The vulnerability raises some concerns in applying deep neural networks in security-critical areas, such as intrusion detection. In this paper, we investigate the performances of the state-of-the-art attack algorithms against deep learning-based intrusion detection on the NSL-KDD data set. The vulnerabilities of neural networks employed by the intrusion detection systems are experimentally validated. The roles of individual features in generating adversarial examples are explored. Based on our findings, the feasibility and applicability of the attack methodologies are discussed.
summary: Zheng @cite_4 implemented several adversarial attack algorithms against a deep learning based intrusion detection system in a traditional network using multi-layer perceptron Feed-forward Neural Network and compared the results from the various adversarial attacks. The author demonstrated that the deep learning based IDS classifier using the FNN was adversely impacted by the adversarial samples. However, the NSL-KDD dataset that was used was generated over a decade ago and may not represent the type of network attack traffic that would be expected in today's IoT networks. @cite_1 also evaluated the NSL-KDD dataset by training a FNN to classify the network packets, and then tested the resilience of their model to adversarial examples. The dataset used in their experiment may not represent a typical IoT network traffic.