• KIPS Transactions on Software and Data Engineering
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.99-110
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• 2023

This study proposed a classification of malicious network traffic using the cyber threat framework(Mitre ATT&CK) and machine learning to solve the real-time traffic detection problems faced by current security monitoring systems. We applied a network traffic dataset called UNSW-NB15 to the Mitre ATT&CK framework to transform the label and generate the final dataset through rare class processing. After learning several boosting-based ensemble models using the generated final dataset, we demonstrated how these ensemble models classify network traffic using various performance metrics. Based on the F-1 score, we showed that XGBoost with no rare class processing is the best in the multi-class traffic environment. We recognized that machine learning ensemble models through Mitre ATT&CK label conversion and oversampling processing have differences over existing studies, but have limitations due to (1) the inability to match perfectly when converting between existing datasets and Mitre ATT&CK labels and (2) the presence of excessive sparse classes. Nevertheless, Catboost with B-SMOTE achieved the classification accuracy of 0.9526, which is expected to be able to automatically detect normal/abnormal network traffic.