GNN-IDS: Graph Neural Network based Intrusion Detection System

Abstract

Intrusion detection systems (IDSs) are widely used to identify anomalies in computer networks and raise alarms on intrusive behaviors. ML-based IDSs generally take network traces or host logs as input to extract patterns from individual samples, whereas the inter-dependencies of network are often not captured and learned, which may result in large amounts of uncertain predictions, false positives, and false negatives. To tackle the challenges in intrusion detection, we propose a graph neural network-based intrusion detection system (GNN-IDS), which is data-driven and machine learning-empowered. In our proposed GNN-IDS, the attack graph and real-time measurements that represent static and dynamic attributes of computer networks, respectively, are incorporated and associated to represent complex computer networks. Graph neural networks are employed as the inference engine for intrusion detection. By learning network connectivity, graph neural networks can quantify the importance of neighboring nodes and node features to make more reliable predictions. Furthermore, by incorporating an attack graph, GNN-IDS could not only detect anomalies but also identify the malicious actions causing the anomalies. The experimental results on a use case network with two synthetic datasets (one generated from public IDS data) show that the proposed GNN-IDS achieves good performance. The results are analyzed from the aspects of uncertainty, explainability, and robustness.