Due to their massive success in various domains, deep learning techniques are
increasingly used to design network intrusion detection solutions that detect
and mitigate unknown and known attacks with high accuracy detection rates and
minimal feature engineering. However, it has been found that deep learning
models are vulnerable to data instances that can mislead the model to make
incorrect classification decisions so-called (adversarial examples). Such
vulnerability allows attackers to target NIDSs by adding small crafty
perturbations to the malicious traffic to evade detection and disrupt the
system's critical functionalities. The problem of deep adversarial learning has
been extensively studied in the computer vision domain; however, it is still an
area of open research in network security applications. Therefore, this survey
explores the researches that employ different aspects of adversarial machine
learning in the area of network intrusion detection in order to provide
directions for potential solutions. First, the surveyed studies are categorized
based on their contribution to generating adversarial examples, evaluating the
robustness of ML-based NIDs towards adversarial examples, and defending these
models against such attacks. Second, we highlight the characteristics
identified in the surveyed research. Furthermore, we discuss the applicability
of the existing generic adversarial attacks for the NIDS domain, the
feasibility of launching the proposed attacks in real-world scenarios, and the
limitations of the existing mitigation solutions.