CSE498, Collaborative Design, Fall 2025
Computer Science and Engineering
Michigan State University

Vectra AI is a leader in the cybersecurity field, harnessing the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to provide clients with state-of-the-art cybersecurity threat detection and real-time response across all domains of enterprise systems. Backed by over a decade of experience, Vectra AI protects enterprises in 113 countries.

Today, the accuracy of threat detection systems depends heavily on access to high-quality, realistic computer network traffic data. Modern enterprises rely on a wide variety of protocols, but producing representative packet captures (PCAPs) for training and testing detection systems is both time-consuming and technically demanding. Engineers rely on manual creation methods, which slows down the ability to respond to new or evolving threats in a timely manner.

To address this challenge, our AI Network Protocol Engine leverages natural language processing and large language models to extract metadata from formal protocol documentation. With this structured data, the system automatically produces realistic internally consistent traffic that is industry compliant. The generated traffic covers a variety of different scenarios over multiple protocols, providing an abundant source of accurate packets for keeping threat detection up to date.

Our system expands the breadth and quality of Vectra AI’s training datasets, filling gaps in protocol coverage while reducing engineering overhead. It ensures that Vectra AI’s detection models remain effective against threats carried over both common and emerging protocols to strengthen client security across the globe.

The AI Network Protocol Engine UI is a local web app built with React. The back end uses ChromaDB for structured storage and OpenAI 4.1 mini as the large language model responsible for generating realistic PCAPs. All generated traffic is validated in Wireshark to ensure accuracy and internal consistency.