Practical GAN-based synthetic IP header trace generation using NetShare

Abstract

We explore the feasibility of using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to automatically learn generative models to generate synthetic packet-and flow header traces for networking tasks (e.g., telemetry, anomaly detection, provisioning). We identify key fidelity, scalability, and privacy challenges and tradeoffs in existing GAN-based approaches. By synthesizing domain-specific insights with recent advances in machine learning and privacy, we identify design choices to tackle these challenges. Building on these insights, we develop an end-To-end framework, NetShare. We evaluate NetShare on six diverse packet header traces and find that: (1) across all distributional metrics and traces, it achieves 46% more accuracy than baselines and (2) it meets users' requirements of downstream tasks in evaluating accuracy and rank ordering of candidate approaches.