LLM-Based Cyberattack Detection Using Network Flow Statistics

Cybersecurity is a growing area of research due to the constantly emerging new types of cyberthreats. Tools and techniques exist to keep systems secure against certain known types of cyberattacks, but are insufficient for others that have recently appeared. Therefore, research is needed to design new strategies to deal with new types of cyberattacks as they arise. Existing tools that harness artificial intelligence techniques mainly use artificial neural networks designed from scratch. In this paper, we present a novel approach for cyberattack detection using an encoder–decoder pre-trained Large Language Model (T5), fine-tuned to adapt its classification scheme for the detection of cyberattacks. Our system is anomaly-based and takes statistics of already finished network flows as input. This work makes significant contributions by introducing a novel methodology for adapting its original task from natural language processing to cybersecurity, achieved by transforming numerical network flow features into a unique abstract artificial language for the model input. We validated the robustness of our detection system across three datasets using undersampling. Our model achieved consistently high performance across all evaluated datasets. Specifically, for the CIC-IDS-2017 dataset, we obtained an accuracy, precision, recall, and F-score of more than 99.94%. For CSE-CIC-IDS-2018, these metrics exceeded 99.84%, and for BCCC-CIC-IDS-2017, they were all above 99.90%. These results collectively demonstrate superior performance for cyberattack detection, while maintaining highly competitive false-positive rates and false-negative rates. This efficacy is achieved by relying exclusively on real-world network flow statistics, without the need for synthetic data generation.