Generative Adversarial Networks for Intrusion Detection Systems: A Comprehensive Survey of Applications, Challenges, and Research Directions

The evolving threat landscape demands intrusion detection systems that adapt quickly to novel attack patterns and operate across heterogeneous environments. Recent studies show that Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) can improve intrusion detection performance by generating synthetic attack traffic, balancing imbalanced datasets, enhancing adversarial robustness, and serving as anomaly detectors. This survey provides a comprehensive and systematic review of GAN-based intrusion detection system (IDS) research, analyzing the architectures employed—including Wasserstein GANs, conditional GANs, self-attention GANs, and specialized multi-generator designs—together with their applications, datasets, and evaluation metrics. Unlike previous surveys, we extend the scope to resource-constrained Internet of Things (IoT) and federated scenarios, where lightweight and tabular GANs can process sensor data and operate on edge devices. We also examine deployments in software-defined networking environments. We propose a unified evaluation framework that reports class-wise precision, recall and macro-F1-scores, per-attack metrics, computational cost, and statistical similarity tests, and we emphasize the need for interpretable and multi-modal approaches that fuse network flows with logs or threat intelligence. Emerging paradigms including GANs combined with large language models, quantum GANs, diffusion models, and reinforcement learning are surveyed, and open challenges such as training instability, mode collapse, hyper-parameter tuning, and ethical dual-use concerns are discussed. By synthesizing recent advances and outlining future research directions, this survey provides a comprehensive and forward-looking reference for practitioners and researchers developing robust, privacy-preserving, and adaptive GAN-based intrusion detection systems.