Covert Timing Channels Detection Based on Auxiliary Classifier Generative Adversarial Network

Abstract

Covert timing channels (CTCs) are defined as a mechanism that embeds covert information into network traffic. In a manner, information leakage caused by CTCs brings serious threat to network security. In recent years, detection of CTCs is a focus and a challenging task in the field of covert channel research. However, existing detection schemes based on statistical methods have poor performance in detecting multiple CTCs, and require so many inter-arrival times of packets that these schemes cannot detect CTCs in real time. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning approach for CTCs detection, namely, covert timing channels detection based on auxiliary classifier generative adversarial network (CD-ACGAN). The network structure and loss function of CD-ACGAN are designed to be suitable for CTCs detection task. We first encode traffic flows into single-channel Gramian Angular Field (GAF) images. Then we use CD-ACGAN to learn features from GAF images and predict the classes of CTCs. Our experimental results show that our approach has high accuracy and strong robustness in detecting various CTCs.

Keywords

• Covert timing channel
• deep learning
• Gramian angular fields
• generative adversarial network