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Article
Darknet traffic classification and adversarial attacks using machine learning
Computers and Security
  • Nhien Rust-Nguyen, San Jose State University
  • Shruti Sharma, San Jose State University
  • Mark Stamp, San Jose State University
Publication Date
4-1-2023
Document Type
Article
DOI
10.1016/j.cose.2023.103098
Abstract

The anonymous nature of darknets is commonly exploited for illegal activities. Previous research has employed machine learning and deep learning techniques to automate the detection of darknet traffic in an attempt to block these criminal activities. This research aims to improve darknet traffic detection by assessing a wide variety of machine learning and deep learning techniques for the classification of such traffic and for classification of the underlying application types. We find that a Random Forest model outperforms other state-of-the-art machine learning techniques used in prior work with the CIC-Darknet2020 dataset. To evaluate the robustness of our Random Forest classifier, we obfuscate select application type classes to simulate realistic adversarial attack scenarios. We demonstrate that our best-performing classifier can be degraded by such attacks, and we consider ways to effectively deal with such adversarial attacks.

Keywords
  • Adversarial attacks,
  • Auxiliary-Classifier generative adversarial network,
  • Classification,
  • Convolutional neural network,
  • Darknet,
  • Random forest
Comments
This is the Version of Record and can also be read online here.
Creative Commons License
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
Citation Information
Nhien Rust-Nguyen, Shruti Sharma and Mark Stamp. "Darknet traffic classification and adversarial attacks using machine learning" Computers and Security Vol. 127 (2023)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/mark_stamp/124/