Adversarial RL for Port-Scan Evasion: Attacker Feature Visibility in Edge-Deployed IDS

Logan Andrew North, Priya Sanjay Kaluskar, Shasi Kumar Ramachandran Prabhu, Peilong Li, Suman Saha

Machine learning-based intrusion detection systems (IDS) are increasingly used in resource-constrained Internet of Things (IoT) environments, yet their robustness is often evaluated against static attacks rather than adversaries that adapt to detection feedback. This paper investigates adaptive port-scan evasion against ML-based IDS models deployed on a Raspberry Pi 3B+. We implement a live Zeek-based IDS pipeline with XGBoost, a multi-layer perceptron, and a 1D convolutional neural network trained on TON_IoT telemetry, and use a Deep Q-Network (DQN) adversary to learn evasive combinations of probe timing, TCP flags, and payload size under black-box, gray-box, and white-box feature-visibility settings. Although the deployed IDS models detect conventional port scans at 91.1--99.8%, DQN final-50-episode evasion rates range from 61.9% to 98.3% across feature-visibility settings. Greater feature visibility does not monotonically improve evasion, and its effect is model-dependent: against XGBoost, the black-box agent achieves 92.9% evasion, compared with 61.9% and 76.9% for gray-box and white-box agents, respectively, whereas 1D-CNN is most vulnerable under white-box access at 98.1%.…