CascadeGen: A Hybrid GAN-Diffusion Framework for Controllable and Protocol-Compliant Synthetic Network Traffic Generation
摘要
Generative models such as GANs and Diffusion Models show promise in network traffic synthesis, yet often fail to jointly deliver high fidelity, strict protocol compliance, and fine-grained parameter control. We propose CascadeGen, a two-stage hybrid framework that first employs a parameter-aware conditional GAN to generate accurate flow-level statistics, then uses a conditional Diffusion Model to refine them into high-fidelity packet-level nPrint representations. A post-processing module further enforces protocol correctness to ensure practical usability. On public datasets, CascadeGen significantly surpasses single-stage baselines, achieving up to 40.2% JSD reduction for statistical similarity, a 20.6% FID reduction for packet-level fidelity, and a 6.2% point increase in PCR, while also demonstrating over 90.1% MRE reduction for precise control of key attack parameters. CascadeGen provides an advanced framework for generating high-quality, customizable synthetic traffic in the field of network security.