DeepHTTP: Semantics-Structure Model with Attention for Anomalous HTTP Traffic Detection and Pattern Mining

Abstract

In the Internet age, cyber-attacks occur frequently with complex types. Traffic generated by access activities can record website status and user request information, which brings a great opportunity for network attack detection. Among diverse network protocols, Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is widely used in government, organizations and enterprises. In this work, we propose DeepHTTP, a semantics structure integration model utilizing Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) with attention mechanism to model HTTP traffic as a natural language sequence. In addition to extracting traffic content information, we integrate structural information to enhance the generalization capabilities of the model. Moreover, the application of attention mechanism can assist in discovering critical parts of anomalous traffic and further mining attack patterns. Additionally, we demonstrate how to incrementally update the data set and retrain model so that it can be adapted to new anomalous traffic. Extensive experimental evaluations over large traffic data have illustrated that DeepHTTP has outstanding performance in traffic detection and pattern discovery.