STS-AT: A Structured Tensor Flow Adversarial Training Framework for Robust Intrusion Detection

Network intrusion detection is a key technology for ensuring cybersecurity. However, current methods face two major challenges: reliance on manual feature engineering, which leads to the loss of discriminative information, and the vulnerability of deep learning models to adversarial sample attacks. To address these issues, this paper proposes STS-AT, a novel network intrusion detection method that integrates structured tensors with adversarial training. The method consists of three core components: first, structured tensor encoding, which fully converts raw hexadecimal traffic into a numerical representation; second, a hierarchical deep learning model that combines CNN and LSTM networks to simultaneously learn spatial and temporal features of the traffic; third, a multi-strategy adversarial training method that enhances model robustness by adaptively adjusting the mix of adversarial samples in different training phases. Experiments on the CICIDS2017 dataset show that the proposed method achieves an accuracy of 99.6% in normal traffic classification, significantly outperforming classical machine learning baselines such as Random Forest (93.1%) and Support Vector Machine (84.7%). Crucially, under various adversarial attacks (FGSM, PGD, and DeepFool), the accuracy of an undefended model drops to as low as 24.4%, whereas after multi-strategy adversarial training, the defense accuracy rises above 96.8%. Meanwhile, the total training time is reduced by approximately 67.6%. These results verify that structured tensor encoding effectively preserves original traffic information, the hierarchical model achieves comprehensive feature learning, and multi-strategy adversarial training significantly improves training efficiency while ensuring robust defense effectiveness.