Machine Learning based Anomaly Detection for 5G Networks

Protecting the networks of tomorrow is set to be a challenging domain due to increasing cyber security threats and widening attack surfaces created by the Internet of Things (IoT), increased network heterogeneity, increased use of virtualisation technologies and distributed architectures. This paper proposes SDS (Software Defined Security) as a means to provide an automated, flexible and scalable network defence system. SDS will harness current advances in machine learning to design a CNN (Convolutional Neural Network) using NAS (Neural Architecture Search) to detect anomalous network traffic. SDS can be applied to an intrusion detection system to create a more proactive and end-to-end defence for a 5G network. To test this assumption, normal and anomalous network flows from a simulated environment have been collected and analyzed with a CNN. The results from this method are promising as the model has identified benign traffic with a 100% accuracy rate and anomalous traffic with a 96.4% detection rate. This demonstrates the effectiveness of network flow analysis for a variety of common malicious attacks and also provides a viable option for detection of encrypted malicious network traffic.