BERT-based network for intrusion detection system

The rising complexity of cyberattacks poses significant challenges to traditional intrusion detection system (IDS). Approaches that rely mainly on feature engineering and rule matching often fail to address new and complex attack patterns effectively. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a network IDS based on bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT), which aims to leverage recent advances in the field of natural language processing (NLP) to enhance the performance of IDS. The core of our approach lies in converting network traffic data into textual representations that can be processed by applying advanced NLP techniques. Specifically, we first convert various types of information in network traffic into a natural-language-like sequence representation, which allows us to utilize a pre-trained BERT model for feature extraction. The BERT model, with its bidirectional encoder structure, captures complex contextual information in sequences, producing high-quality feature representations. After feature extraction is completed, we further perform classification using a classifier based on a bidirectional gated recurrent unit (GRU) network, which is able to efficiently process sequence data and reduce computational complexity while capturing temporal dependencies in the sequences. By training the classifier on the basis of the extracted features, we are able to achieve an accurate distinction between normal and abnormal traffic. To validate the effectiveness of our approach, we conducted experiments on several public datasets, and the experimental results show that the BERT-based network IDS significantly outperforms traditional machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) methods in terms of detection performance. The BERT model enhances detection accuracy and effectively captures complex attack patterns, compared to traditional methods. Our research not only demonstrates the great potential of NLP technology in the field of network security but also provides a new research direction for cross-domain applications. By treating network traffic as a “language,” our approach resolves issues that traditional methods struggle with while being scalable and adaptable to various network environments and attack patterns.