HTTPSmell: A Deep Learning Approach on Malicious HTTP Traffic Detection via Data Augmentation and Label Refactoring

• Published in: Security and communication networks 2024-01, Vol.2024 (1)
• Main Authors: Chen, Tieming, Qiu, Xuebo, Weng, Zhengqiu, Zhu, Tiantian, Lv, Mingqi, Sun, Keda
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 1939-0114; 1939-0122
• DOI: 10.1155/2024/6964759

Anomaly detection is essential to ensuring system security and reliability. As one of the basic techniques in the cyberattack, the existing malicious traffic classification method has been facing diverse challenges such as insufficient samples, poor denoising ability, and weak generalization of the classification model. In this paper, we propose a novel method for detecting malicious HTTP traffic based on a framework (HTTPSmell; it refers to the sniffing of some network attacks launched by exploiting the HTTP protocol.)), and XSS dataset obtained from GitHub that automatically applies a deep learning model with high generalization ability even under a small training dataset. With HTTPSmell, we are able to achieve positive results from a semisupervised model that leverages the unsupervised data augmentation (UDA) and the keywords library avoidance (KLA)‐based data augmentation method that holds higher learning generalization, higher scenario coverage rate, and better detection efficiency in the smaller training samples. Finally, we demonstrate through comprehensive experiments in the realistic enterprise environment that HTTPSmell can achieve an accuracy of 96.77% for identifying complex and advanced cyberattacks, while only maintaining a constant 60 MB of memory and sustaining up to 27 k/s throughput.