Our increasingly connected world continues to face an ever-growing number of network-based attacks. An Intrusion Detection System (IDS) is an essential security technology used for detecting these attacks. Although numerous Machine Learning-based IDSs have been proposed for the detection of malicious network traffic, the majority have difficulty properly detecting and classifying the more uncommon attack types. In this paper, we implement a novel hybrid technique using synthetic data produced by a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to use as input for training a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) model. Our GAN model is trained on the NSL-KDD dataset, a publicly available collection of labeled network traffic data specifically designed to support the evaluation and benchmarking of IDSs. Ultimately, our findings demonstrate that training the DRL model on synthetic datasets generated by specific GAN models can result in better performance in correctly classifying minority classes over training on the true imbalanced dataset.
Keywords: Deep Reinforcement Learning; Generative Adversarial Networks; Machine Learning; NSL-KDD; Network Intrusion Detection System; network security.