Comparison of Machine Learning and Deep Learning Models for Network Intrusion Detection Systems

Niraj Thapa, Zhipeng Liu, Dukka B. Kc, Balakrishna Gokaraju and Kaushik Roy
Additional contact information
Niraj Thapa: Department of Computational Data Science and Engineering, North Carolina A&T State University, Greensboro, NC 27411, USA
Zhipeng Liu: Department of Computer Science, North Carolina A&T State University, Greensboro, NC 27411, USA
Dukka B. Kc: Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department, Wichita State University, Wichita, KS 67260, USA
Balakrishna Gokaraju: Department of Computational Data Science and Engineering, North Carolina A&T State University, Greensboro, NC 27411, USA
Kaushik Roy: Department of Computer Science, North Carolina A&T State University, Greensboro, NC 27411, USA

Future Internet, 2020, vol. 12, issue 10, 1-16

Abstract: The development of robust anomaly-based network detection systems, which are preferred over static signal-based network intrusion, is vital for cybersecurity. The development of a flexible and dynamic security system is required to tackle the new attacks. Current intrusion detection systems (IDSs) suffer to attain both the high detection rate and low false alarm rate. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose an IDS using different machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) models. This paper presents a comparative analysis of different ML models and DL models on Coburg intrusion detection datasets (CIDDSs). First, we compare different ML- and DL-based models on the CIDDS dataset. Second, we propose an ensemble model that combines the best ML and DL models to achieve high-performance metrics. Finally, we benchmarked our best models with the CIC-IDS2017 dataset and compared them with state-of-the-art models. While the popular IDS datasets like KDD99 and NSL-KDD fail to represent the recent attacks and suffer from network biases, CIDDS, used in this research, encompasses labeled flow-based data in a simulated office environment with both updated attacks and normal usage. Furthermore, both accuracy and interpretability must be considered while implementing AI models. Both ML and DL models achieved an accuracy of 99% on the CIDDS dataset with a high detection rate, low false alarm rate, and relatively low training costs. Feature importance was also studied using the Classification and regression tree (CART) model. Our models performed well in 10-fold cross-validation and independent testing. CART and convolutional neural network (CNN) with embedding achieved slightly better performance on the CIC-IDS2017 dataset compared to previous models. Together, these results suggest that both ML and DL methods are robust and complementary techniques as an effective network intrusion detection system.

Keywords: network intrusion detection; CIDDS; machine learning; deep learning; KNN; CART; XGBoost; CNN; LSTM; ensemble (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/12/10/167/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/12/10/167/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jftint:v:12:y:2020:i:10:p:167-:d:421767

Access Statistics for this article

Future Internet is currently edited by Ms. Grace You

More articles in Future Internet from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().