Attention-Based Self-Supervised Feature Learning for Security Data

I-Ta Lee, Manish Marwah, Martin F. Arlitt

Abstract: While applications of machine learning in cyber-security have grown rapidly, most models use manually constructed features. This manual approach is error-prone and requires domain expertise. In this paper, we design a self-supervised sequence-to-sequence model with attention to learn an embedding for data routinely used in cyber-security applications. The method is validated on two real world public data sets. The learned features are used in an anomaly detection model and perform better than learned features from baseline methods.