Poisoning the Well: Adversarial Poisoning on ML-Based Software-Defined Network Intrusion Detection Systems

With the usage of Machine Learning (ML) algorithms in modern-day Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS), contemporary network communications are efficiently protected from cyber threats. However, these ML algorithms are starting to be compromised by adversarial attacks that ambush the ML pipeline. This paper demonstrates the feasibility of an adversarial attack called the Cosine Similarity Label Manipulation (CSLM) which is geared toward compromising training labels for ML-based NIDS. The paper develops two versions of CSLM attacks: Minimum CSLM (Min-CSLM) and Maximum CSLM (Max-CSLM). We demonstrate the attacks' efficacy towards single and multi-controller Software-defined Network (SDN) setups. Results indicate that the proposed attacks provide substantial deterioration of classifier performance in single SDNs, specifically, those that utilize Random Forests (RF), which deteriorate <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\approx$</tex-math></inline-formula>50% under Min-CSLM attacks, and Support Vector Machines (SVM), which undergo <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\approx$</tex-math></inline-formula>60% deterioration from a Max-CSLM attack. We also note that RF, SVM, and Multi-layer Perceptron (MLP) classifiers are also extensively vulnerable to these attacks in Multi-controller SDN setups (MSDN) as they incur the most observed utility deterioration. MLP-based uniform MSDNs incur the most deterioration under both proposed CSLM attacks with <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\approx$</tex-math></inline-formula>28% decrease in performance, while SVM and RF-based variable MSDNs incur the most deterioration under both CSLM attacks with <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\approx$</tex-math></inline-formula>30% and <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\approx$</tex-math></inline-formula> 35% decrease in performance, respectively.