Network intrusion detection using oversampling technique and machine learning algorithms

The expeditious growth of the World Wide Web and the rampant flow of network traffic have resulted in a continuous increase of network security threats. Cyber attackers seek to exploit vulnerabilities in network architecture to steal valuable information or disrupt computer resources. Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS) is used to effectively detect various attacks, thus providing timely protection to network resources from these attacks. To implement NIDS, a stream of supervised and unsupervised machine learning approaches is applied to detect irregularities in network traffic and to address network security issues. Such NIDSs are trained using various datasets that include attack traces. However, due to the advancement in modern-day attacks, these systems are unable to detect the emerging threats. Therefore, NIDS needs to be trained and developed with a modern comprehensive dataset which contains contemporary common and attack activities. This paper presents a framework in which different machine learning classification schemes are employed to detect various types of network attack categories. Five machine learning algorithms: Random Forest, Decision Tree, Logistic Regression, K-Nearest Neighbors and Artificial Neural Networks, are used for attack detection. This study uses a dataset published by the University of New South Wales (UNSW-NB15), a relatively new dataset that contains a large amount of network traffic data with nine categories of network attacks. The results show that the classification models achieved the highest accuracy of 89.29% by applying the Random Forest algorithm. Further improvement in the accuracy of classification models is observed when Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) is applied to address the class imbalance problem. After applying the SMOTE, the Random Forest classifier showed an accuracy of 95.1% with 24 selected features from the Principal Component Analysis method.

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Ensemble-Based Online Machine Learning Algorithms for Network Intrusion Detection Systems Using Streaming Data

Information ◽

10.3390/info11060315 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 11 (6) ◽

pp. 315

Author(s):

Nathan Martindale ◽

Muhammad Ismail ◽

Douglas A. Talbert

Keyword(s):

Machine Learning ◽

Random Forest ◽

Intrusion Detection ◽

Learning Algorithms ◽

Machine Learning Algorithms ◽

Intrusion Detection Systems ◽

Network Intrusion Detection ◽

Detection Systems ◽

Network Intrusion ◽

Network Intrusion Detection Systems

As new cyberattacks are launched against systems and networks on a daily basis, the ability for network intrusion detection systems to operate efficiently in the big data era has become critically important, particularly as more low-power Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices enter the market. This has motivated research in applying machine learning algorithms that can operate on streams of data, trained online or “live” on only a small amount of data kept in memory at a time, as opposed to the more classical approaches that are trained solely offline on all of the data at once. In this context, one important concept from machine learning for improving detection performance is the idea of “ensembles”, where a collection of machine learning algorithms are combined to compensate for their individual limitations and produce an overall superior algorithm. Unfortunately, existing research lacks proper performance comparison between homogeneous and heterogeneous online ensembles. Hence, this paper investigates several homogeneous and heterogeneous ensembles, proposes three novel online heterogeneous ensembles for intrusion detection, and compares their performance accuracy, run-time complexity, and response to concept drifts. Out of the proposed novel online ensembles, the heterogeneous ensemble consisting of an adaptive random forest of Hoeffding Trees combined with a Hoeffding Adaptive Tree performed the best, by dealing with concept drift in the most effective way. While this scheme is less accurate than a larger size adaptive random forest, it offered a marginally better run-time, which is beneficial for online training.

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