A deep learning-based method for HTTP payload classification in attack detection
Ming Zhu, Tao Hong, Qinglan Luo, Xia Shang · 2023
Attack detection is a crucial process that involves closely monitoring and identifying malicious attacks. To identify and locate such attacks with precision, there is a need for a thorough analysis and classification of malicious payloads. To this end, a deep learning-based method is proposed in this paper, which enables the efficient classification of payloads for attack detection. The method involves segmenting the payloads using regular expressions, which helps in preserving their syntactic structure. Also, an improved TF-IDF algorithm is introduced to construct a streamlined vocabulary that alleviates the slow training problem caused by a large vocabulary. By fusing the features of vectors extracted using CNN and BiLSTM-Attention, the payload content can be effectively represented, yielding more accurate recognition results and improving the problem of low detection accuracy associated with traditional methods. The experimental results reveal that the proposed method achieved an accuracy of 99.21% on the CSIC 2010 dataset, which is significantly higher than that of the traditional method, and has faster training speed. This suggests that the proposed method can detect more stealthy attacks and build a more effective Web attack detection system.