Contrastive Self-Supervised Network Intrusion Detection using Augmented Negative Pairs

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Wilkie, Jack, Hindy, Hanan, Tachtatzis, Christos, Atkinson, Robert
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Wilkie, Jack
Hindy, Hanan
Tachtatzis, Christos
Atkinson, Robert
author_facet Wilkie, Jack
Hindy, Hanan
Tachtatzis, Christos
Atkinson, Robert
contents Network intrusion detection remains a critical challenge in cybersecurity. While supervised machine learning models achieve state-of-the-art performance, their reliance on large labelled datasets makes them impractical for many real-world applications. Anomaly detection methods, which train exclusively on benign traffic to identify malicious activity, suffer from high false positive rates, limiting their usability. Recently, self-supervised learning techniques have demonstrated improved performance with lower false positive rates by learning discriminative latent representations of benign traffic. In particular, contrastive self-supervised models achieve this by minimizing the distance between similar (positive) views of benign traffic while maximizing it between dissimilar (negative) views. Existing approaches generate positive views through data augmentation and treat other samples as negative. In contrast, this work introduces Contrastive Learning using Augmented Negative pairs (CLAN), a novel paradigm for network intrusion detection where augmented samples are treated as negative views - representing potentially malicious distributions - while other benign samples serve as positive views. This approach enhances both classification accuracy and inference efficiency after pretraining on benign traffic. Experimental evaluation on the Lycos2017 dataset demonstrates that the proposed method surpasses existing self-supervised and anomaly detection techniques in a binary classification task. Furthermore, when fine-tuned on a limited labelled dataset, the proposed approach achieves superior multi-class classification performance compared to existing self-supervised models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_06550
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Contrastive Self-Supervised Network Intrusion Detection using Augmented Negative Pairs
Wilkie, Jack
Hindy, Hanan
Tachtatzis, Christos
Atkinson, Robert
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Cryptography and Security
Networking and Internet Architecture
I.2.6; K.6.5
Network intrusion detection remains a critical challenge in cybersecurity. While supervised machine learning models achieve state-of-the-art performance, their reliance on large labelled datasets makes them impractical for many real-world applications. Anomaly detection methods, which train exclusively on benign traffic to identify malicious activity, suffer from high false positive rates, limiting their usability. Recently, self-supervised learning techniques have demonstrated improved performance with lower false positive rates by learning discriminative latent representations of benign traffic. In particular, contrastive self-supervised models achieve this by minimizing the distance between similar (positive) views of benign traffic while maximizing it between dissimilar (negative) views. Existing approaches generate positive views through data augmentation and treat other samples as negative. In contrast, this work introduces Contrastive Learning using Augmented Negative pairs (CLAN), a novel paradigm for network intrusion detection where augmented samples are treated as negative views - representing potentially malicious distributions - while other benign samples serve as positive views. This approach enhances both classification accuracy and inference efficiency after pretraining on benign traffic. Experimental evaluation on the Lycos2017 dataset demonstrates that the proposed method surpasses existing self-supervised and anomaly detection techniques in a binary classification task. Furthermore, when fine-tuned on a limited labelled dataset, the proposed approach achieves superior multi-class classification performance compared to existing self-supervised models.
title Contrastive Self-Supervised Network Intrusion Detection using Augmented Negative Pairs
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Cryptography and Security
Networking and Internet Architecture
I.2.6; K.6.5
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06550