Detecting AI-Generated Network Traffic Using Transformer–MLP Ensemble

The rapid growth of generative artificial intelligence (AI) has enabled diverse applications but also introduced new attack techniques. Similar to deepfake media, generative AI can be exploited to create AI-generated traffic that evades existing intrusion detection systems (IDSs). This paper proposes a Dual Detection System to detect such synthetic network traffic in the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol widely used in Internet of Things (IoT) environments. The system operates in two stages: (i) primary filtering with a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model to detect malicious traffic, and (ii) secondary verification with a Transformer–MLP ensemble to identify AI-generated traffic. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves an average accuracy of 99.1 ± 0.6% across different traffic types (normal, malicious, and AI-generated), with nearly 100% detection of synthetic traffic. These findings demonstrate that the proposed dual detection system effectively overcomes the limitations of single-model approaches and significantly enhances detection performance.