FeCoGraph: Label-Aware Federated Graph Contrastive Learning for Few-Shot Network Intrusion Detection

Qinghua Mao, Xi Lin, Wenchao Xu, Yuxin Qi, Xiu Su, Gaolei Li, Jianhua Li

Abstract: With increasing cyber attacks over the Internet, network intrusion detection systems (NIDS) have been an indispensable barrier to protecting network security. Taking advantage of automatically capturing topology connections, recent deep graph learning approaches have achieved remarkable performance in distinguishing different types of malicious flows. However, there remain some critical challenges. 1) previous supervised learning methods rely heavily on abundant and high-quality annotated samples, while label annotation requires abundant time and expert knowledge. 2) Centralized methods require all data to be uploaded to a server for learning behavior patterns, which results in high detection latency and critical privacy leakage. 3) Diverse attack scenarios exhibit highly imbalanced distribution, making it hard to characterize abnormal behaviors. To address these issues, we proposed FeCoGraph, a label-aware federated graph contrastive learning framework for intrusion detection in few-shot scenarios. The line graph is introduced to directly process flow embeddings, which are compatible with diverse GNNs. Furthermore, We formulate a graph contrastive learning task to effectively leverage label information, allowing intra-class embeddings more compact than inter-class embeddings. To improve the scalability of NIDS, we utilize federated learning to cover more attack scenarios while protecting data privacy. Experiment results show that FeCoGraph surpass E-graphSAGE with an average 8.36% accuracy on binary classification and 6.77% accuracy on multiclass classification, demonstrating the efficiency of our approach.