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Extracting and analyzing network traffic feature is fundamental in the design and implementation of network behavior anomaly detection methods. The traditional network traffic feature method focuses on the statistical features of traffic volume. However, this approach is not sufficient to reflect the communication pattern features. A different approach is required to detect anomalous behaviors that do not exhibit traffic volume changes, such as low-intensity anomalous behaviors caused by Denial of Service/Distributed Denial of Service (DoS/DDoS) attacks, Internet worms and scanning, and BotNets. We propose an efficient traffic feature extraction architecture based on our proposed approach, which combines the benefit of traffic volume features and network communication pattern features. This method can detect low-intensity anomalous network behaviors and conventional traffic volume anomalies. We implemented our approach on Spark Streaming and validated our feature set using labelled real-world dataset collected from the Sichuan University campus network. Our results demonstrate that the traffic feature extraction approach is efficient in detecting both traffic variations and communication structure changes. Based on our evaluation of the MIT-DRAPA dataset, the same detection approach utilizes traffic volume features with detection precision of 82.3% and communication pattern features with detection precision of 89.9%. Our proposed feature set improves precision by 94%.


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Efficient Feature Extraction Using Apache Spark for Network Behavior Anomaly Detection

Show Author's information Xiaoming YeXingshu Chen( )Dunhu LiuWenxian WangLi YangGang LiangGuolin Shao
School of Cybersecurity, Chengdu University of Information Technology, Chengdu 610225
College of Cybersecurity, Sichuan University, Chengdu 610065, China.
School of Management, Chengdu University of Information Technology, Chengdu 610103, China.
College of Compute Science, Sichuan University, Chengdu 610065, China.

Abstract

Extracting and analyzing network traffic feature is fundamental in the design and implementation of network behavior anomaly detection methods. The traditional network traffic feature method focuses on the statistical features of traffic volume. However, this approach is not sufficient to reflect the communication pattern features. A different approach is required to detect anomalous behaviors that do not exhibit traffic volume changes, such as low-intensity anomalous behaviors caused by Denial of Service/Distributed Denial of Service (DoS/DDoS) attacks, Internet worms and scanning, and BotNets. We propose an efficient traffic feature extraction architecture based on our proposed approach, which combines the benefit of traffic volume features and network communication pattern features. This method can detect low-intensity anomalous network behaviors and conventional traffic volume anomalies. We implemented our approach on Spark Streaming and validated our feature set using labelled real-world dataset collected from the Sichuan University campus network. Our results demonstrate that the traffic feature extraction approach is efficient in detecting both traffic variations and communication structure changes. Based on our evaluation of the MIT-DRAPA dataset, the same detection approach utilizes traffic volume features with detection precision of 82.3% and communication pattern features with detection precision of 89.9%. Our proposed feature set improves precision by 94%.

Keywords: feature extraction, network behavior, anomaly detection, graph theory, Apache Spark

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Received: 24 September 2017
Accepted: 29 September 2017
Published: 17 September 2018
Issue date: October 2018

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© The author(s) 2018

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61272447), Sichuan Province Science and Technology Planning (Nos. 2016GZ0042, 16ZHSF0483, and 2017GZ0168), Key Research Project of Sichuan Provincial Department of Education (Nos. 17ZA0238 and 17ZA0200), and Scientific Research Staring Foundation for Young Teachers of Sichuan University (No. 2015SCU11079).

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