Enhancing Automata Learning with Statistical Machine Learning: A Network Security Case Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Intrusion detection systems are crucial for network security. Verification of these systems is complicated by various factors, including the heterogeneity of network platforms and the continuously changing landscape of cyber threats. In this paper, we use automata learning to derive state machines from network-traffic data with the objective of supporting behavioural verification of intrusion detection systems. The most innovative aspect of our work is addressing the inability to directly apply existing automata learning techniques to network-traffic data due to the numeric nature of such data. Specifically, we use interpretable machine learning (ML) to partition numeric ranges into intervals that strongly correlate with a system's decisions regarding intrusion detection. These intervals are subsequently used to abstract numeric ranges before automata learning. We apply our ML-enhanced automata learning approach to a commercial network intrusion detection system developed by our industry partner, RabbitRun Technologies. Our approach results in an average 67.5% reduction in the number of states and transitions of the learned state machines, while achieving an average 28% improvement in accuracy compared to using expertise-based numeric data abstraction. Furthermore, the resulting state machines help practitioners in verifying system-level security requirements and exploring previously unknown system behaviours through model checking and temporal query checking. We make our implementation and experimental data available online.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".