TRACE: A Robust Framework for Malicious Traffic Detection with Noisy Labels

Abstract

Deep learning-based malicious traffic detection requires large-scale, accurately labeled datasets. However, realistic malicious traffic datasets contain noisy labels due to annotation errors, which can degrade the performance of detection models. Existing methods for handling noisy labels involve robust training or data cleaning. However, both approaches risk excluding hard samples from model update, leading to suboptimal decision boundaries and reduced classification performance. To this end, we introduce TRACE, a novel framework that leverages multi-loss optimization to induce robust traffic representations while utilizing all samples. TRACE utilizes a one-dimensional convolutional neural network (1D CNN) with multi-head attention to generate fine-grained traffic representations. Then, TRACE employs multi-loss optimization to enhance representation robustness, ensuring representation integrity and class separability, thereby laying the foundation for effective decision boundaries. The experimental results on two public datasets demonstrate that TRACE achieves an accuracy of 88.3% and an F1-score of 81% with 90% label noise, outperforming the state-of-the-art methods.