STAN: Synthetic Network Traffic Generation using Autoregressive Neural Models

For a project overview, installation information, and detailed usage information please visit the project homepage.

• Homepage: https://sanghani-projects.cs.vt.edu/stan/
• Documentation: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1haSCXQRti21X08B9otwk4nVeB_zRoaKYFGoGXFvP3kc/edit?usp=sharing
• Repository: https://github.com/ShengzheXu/stan

Overview

Implementation of our submitting paper Network Traffic Data Generation usingAutoregressive Neural Models.

STAN is an autoregressive data synthesizer that can generate synthetic time-series multi-variable data. A flexible architecture supports to generate multi-variable data with any combination of continuous & discrete attributes. Tool document is [here].

• Dependency capturing: STAN learns dependency in a time-window context rectangular, including both temporal dependency and attribute dependency.
• Network structure: STAN uses CNN to extract dependent context features, mixture density layers to predict continuous attributes, and softmax layers to predict discrete attributes.
• Application dataset: UGR'16: A New Dataset for the Evaluation of Cyclostationarity-Based Network IDSs [link]

STAN Structure

Installation

Download source code by

pip install stannetflow

Using STAN vis Docker

Build a Docker image with STAN CLI:

cd ./make_nfattacker_docker
docker build -f ./nfattacker2.0 -t nfattacker:v2.0 ./

After build finished, run the container

docker run --rm -it --name nfattacker -v $(pwd):/workspace nfattacker:v2.0 bash

Play with model

Data Format

STAN expects the input data to be a table given as either a numpy.ndarray or a pandas.DataFrame object with two types of columns:

• Continuous Columns: Columns that contain numerical values and which can take any value.
• Discrete columns: Columns that only contain a finite number of possible values, wether these are string values or not.

Standard Tabular (Simulated) data with number-based sampler.

from stannetflow import STANSynthesizer
from stannetflow.artificial.datamaker import artificial_data_generator

def test_artificial():
  adg = artificial_data_generator(weight_list=[0.9, 0.9])
  df_naive = adg.sample(row_num=100)
  X, y = adg.agg(agg=1)

  stan = STANSynthesizer(dim_in=2, dim_window=1)
  stan.fit(X, y)
  samples = stan.sample(10)
  print(samples)

Netflow data with continuous/discrete/categorical columns settings and condition-based sampler. (with delta time generation and target time length condition.) Discrete and categorical columns can be explicitly set to improve the modeling performance. Instead of using .fit() and .sample(), for large dataset use .batch_fit() and .time_series_sample(). In addition, for the Netflow data, we need NetworkTrafficTransformer().rev_transfer() to support translating the generated model output back to the real Netflow form.

from stannetflow import STANSynthesizer, STANCustomDataLoader, NetflowFormatTransformer

def test_ugr16(train_file, load_checkpoint=False):
  train_loader = STANCustomDataLoader(train_file, 6, 16).get_loader()
  ugr16_n_col, ugr16_n_agg, ugr16_arch_mode = 16, 5, 'B'
  # index of the columns that are discrete (in one-hot groups), categorical (number of types)
  # or any order if wanted
  ugr16_discrete_columns = [[11,12], [13, 14, 15]]
  ugr16_categorical_columns = {5:1670, 6:1670, 7:256, 8:256, 9:256, 10:256}
  ugr16_execute_order = [0,1,13,11,5,6,7,8,9,10,3,2,4]

  stan = STANSynthesizer(dim_in=ugr16_n_col, dim_window=ugr16_n_agg, 
          discrete_columns=ugr16_discrete_columns,
          categorical_columns=ugr16_categorical_columns,
          execute_order=ugr16_execute_order,
          arch_mode=ugr16_arch_mode
          )
  
  if load_checkpoint is False:
    stan.batch_fit(train_loader, epochs=2)
  else:
    stan.load_model('ep998') # checkpoint name
    # validation
    # stan.validate_loss(test_loader, loaded_ep='ep998')

  ntt = NetflowFormatTransformer()
  samples = stan.time_series_sample(864)
  df_rev = ntt.rev_transfer(samples)
  print(df_rev)
  return df_rev

Example data making and model training cases

python test.py

Citations

@inproceedings{xu2021stan,
  title={STAN: Synthetic Network Traffic Generation with Generative Neural Models},
  author={Xu, Shengzhe and Marwah, Manish and Arlitt, Martin and Ramakrishnan, Naren},
  booktitle={International Workshop on Deployable Machine Learning for Security Defense},
  pages={3--29},
  year={2021},
  organization={Springer}
}