Revolutionizing Payload Inspection: A Self-Supervised Journey to Precision with Few Shots

As networks continue to expand and become more interconnected, the need for novel malware detection methods becomes more pronounced. Traditional security measures are increasingly inadequate against the sophistication of modern cyber attacks. Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) has been pivotal in enhancing network security, offering an in-depth analysis of network traffic that surpasses conventional monitoring techniques. DPI not only examines the metadata of network packets, but also dives into the actual content being carried within the packet payloads, providing a comprehensive view of the data flowing through networks. The integration of advanced deep learning techniques with DPI has introduced modern methodologies into malware detection. However, the challenge with the state-of-the-art supervised learning approaches is that they prevent the generalization to unseen attacks embedded in the payloads, prohibiting them from accurately detecting new attacks and transferring knowledge learned from previous attacks to the new attacks with small labeled sample sizes. This paper leverages the recent advancements in self-supervised learning and few-shot learning. Our proposed self-supervised approach trains a transformer to learn the embedding of the payloads from a vast amount of unlabeled datasets by masking portions of payloads, leading to a learnt representation that well generalizes to various downstream tasks. Once the representation is extracted from payloads, they are used to train a malware detection algorithm. The representation obtained from the transformer is then used to adapt the malware detector to novel types of attacks using few-shot learning approaches. Our experimental results across several datasets show the great success and generalization of the proposed approach to novel scenarios.