Novel Darknet traffic data synthesis using Generative Adversarial Networks enhanced with oscillatory Growing Cosine Unit activated convolution layers

•Created a Generative Adversarial network which generates training and testing data for Darknet traffic which is otherwise very difficult to capture.•Enhanced the performance of the GAN by using an oscillatory Growing Cosine Unit in the convoluted layers.•Feature selection with statistical correlation methods is used to select the most relevant features.•Higher accuracy was achieved with the proposed GAN when compared to GTGAN and CopulaGAN. The Darknet is an anonymous, encrypted collection of websites, with a passive listening nature - accepting incoming packets, while not supporting outgoing packets. Thus, it can potentially host criminal or malicious activity and software, becoming a cyber security threat. Network Detection Systems are effective in identifying dark net traffic and mitigating its ill effects. However, capturing and extracting data from raw network traffic for training these systems can be time-intensive and costly. Using the CIC-Darknet 2020 dataset, this paper proposes using a Novel Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) Architecture generating the required training and testing data for these systems. This uses a combination of Growing Cosine Unit (GCU) activated convolution layers and Dense layers for the Generator. Feature selection with statistical correlation methods is used to select the most relevant features. An independently trained Evaluator network is used to evaluate the generated data. The proposed system is compared to other established Tabular data GANs like Conditional Tabular GAN (CTGAN) and Copula GAN with similar parameters and on the same data. The Proposed GAN architecture outperforms CTGAN and CopulaGAN by 20 % and 10 % in ters of accuracy while also taking 90 % and 30 % less time to train respectively. Results from measuring similarity of data using the Inverted Kolmogorov - Smirnov D statistic also show significantly better results for the Proposed GAN Architecture. This shows significant promise in using Generative models to reduce the time and effort costs associated with collecting and formatting data to use in research and for training detection systems.