INTACT: Intent-Aware Representation Learning for Cryptographic Traffic Violation Detection
Organizations: Department of Electronics & Electrical Engineering, BITS Pilani, Hyderabad Campus
Abstract
Security monitoring systems typically treat anomaly detection as identifying statistical deviations from observed data distributions. In cryptographic traffic analysis, however, violations are defined not by rarity but by explicit policy constraints, including key reuse prohibition, downgrade prevention, and bounded key lifetimes. This fundamental mismatch limits the interpretability and adaptability of conventional anomaly detection methods. We introduce INTACT (INTent-Aware Cryptographic Traffic), a policy-conditioned framework that reformulates violation detection as conditional constraint learning. Instead of learning a static decision boundary over behavioral features, INTACT models the probability of violation conditioned on both observed behavior and declared security intent. The architecture factorizes representation learning into behavioral and intent encoders whose fused embeddings produce a violation score, yielding a policy-parameterized family of decision boundaries. We evaluate the framework on a real-world network flow dataset and a 210,000-trace synthetic multi-intent cryptographic dataset. INTACT matches or exceeds strong unsupervised and supervised baselines, achieving near-perfect discrimination (AUROC up to 1.0000) in the real dataset and consistent superiority in detecting relational and composite violations in the synthetic setting. These results demonstrate that explicit intent conditioning improves discrimination, interpretability, and robustness in cryptographic monitoring.
Figures & tables
| Section | Real Network Flow Dataset | Synthetic Intent-Anomaly Dataset |
|---|---|---|
| A. Overall Scale | ||
| Total records / traces | 2,830,743 flow records | 210,000 traces |
| Total atomic events | 2,830,743 | 4,193,768 operations |
| Input dimensionality | 7 numerical features | 8 per-operation attributes |
| Target variables | Binary lifetime violation | Reuse, Downgrade, Lifetime flags |
| Data source | Real network traffic (multi-day) | Controlled generative process |
| Model | Learning Paradigm | Input Dim. | Architecture | Embedding Size | Output | Params |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nonlinear AE | Unsupervised | 7 / 17 | Enc: 16→8 (ReLU); Dec: 16→linear | 8 | Recon. error | 1–3K |
| Linear AE | Unsupervised | 7 / 17 | Enc: 4 (linear); Dec: linear | 4 | Recon. error | 1K |
| Deep SVDD | Unsupervised | 7 / 17 | Embedding network + hypersphere constraint | Latent vector | Distance score | Few K |
| Isolation Forest | Unsupervised | 7 / 17 | 100-tree ensemble (random partitions) | N/A | Path-length score | Tree ensemble |
| Supervised NN | Supervised | 7 / 17 | 64→32→16 (ReLU)→1 (Sigmoid) | 64–32–16 | Binary prob. | 3K–5K |
| INTACT | Supervised (Multi-input) | Behavior: 7 / 17; Intent: 1 | Behavior: 128→64→32; Intent: 16→16; Fusion: 24→1 | 32 + 16 → 48 | Binary prob. | 12,865 |
| Dataset | Intent | Model | AUROC | AUPRC | F1 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Real (Test) | Lifetime | Nonlinear Autoencoder | 0.7854 | 0.0518 | 0.1687 |
| Deep SVDD | 0.9575 | 0.2101 | 0.4963 | ||
| Isolation Forest | 0.9631 | 0.3058 | 0.4115 | ||
| Linear Autoencoder | 0.9352 | 0.1598 | 0.2594 | ||
| Supervised NN | 1.0000 | 1.0000 | 1.0000 | ||
| INTACT | 1.0000 | 1.0000 | 0.9973 |
Encrypted Network Traffic Analysis
Encrypted network traffic analysis infers applications, threats, and network conditions from traffic patterns without decrypting payloads.
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