TY - JOUR
T1 - Utilising Deep Learning techniques for effective zero-day attack detection
AU - Hindy, Hanan
AU - Atkinson, Robert
AU - Tachtatzis, Christos
AU - Colin, Jean-Noël
AU - Bayne, Ethan
AU - Bellekens, Xavier
PY - 2020/10/14
Y1 - 2020/10/14
N2 - Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) have been used for building Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS). The increase in both the number and sheer variety of new cyber-attacks poses a tremendous challenge for IDS solutions that rely on a database of historical attack signatures. Therefore, the industrial pull for robust IDS capable of flagging zero-day attacks is growing. Current outlier-based zero-day detection research suffers from high false-negative rates, thus limiting their practical use and performance. This paper proposes an autoencoder implementation to detect zero-day attacks. The aim is to build an IDS model with high recall while keeping the miss rate (false-negatives) to an acceptable minimum. Two well-known IDS datasets are used for evaluation—CICIDS2017 and NSL-KDD. To demonstrate the efficacy of our model, we compare its results against a One-Class Support Vector Machine (SVM). The manuscript highlights the performance of a One-Class SVM when zero-day attacks are distinctive from normal behaviour. The proposed model benefits greatly from autoencoders encoding-decoding capabilities. The results show that autoencoders are well-suited at detecting complex zero-day attacks. The results demonstrate a zero-day detection accuracy of [89% - 99%] for the NSL-KDD dataset and [75% - 98%] for the CICIDS2017 dataset. Finally, the paper outlines the observed trade-off between recall and fallout.
AB - Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) have been used for building Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS). The increase in both the number and sheer variety of new cyber-attacks poses a tremendous challenge for IDS solutions that rely on a database of historical attack signatures. Therefore, the industrial pull for robust IDS capable of flagging zero-day attacks is growing. Current outlier-based zero-day detection research suffers from high false-negative rates, thus limiting their practical use and performance. This paper proposes an autoencoder implementation to detect zero-day attacks. The aim is to build an IDS model with high recall while keeping the miss rate (false-negatives) to an acceptable minimum. Two well-known IDS datasets are used for evaluation—CICIDS2017 and NSL-KDD. To demonstrate the efficacy of our model, we compare its results against a One-Class Support Vector Machine (SVM). The manuscript highlights the performance of a One-Class SVM when zero-day attacks are distinctive from normal behaviour. The proposed model benefits greatly from autoencoders encoding-decoding capabilities. The results show that autoencoders are well-suited at detecting complex zero-day attacks. The results demonstrate a zero-day detection accuracy of [89% - 99%] for the NSL-KDD dataset and [75% - 98%] for the CICIDS2017 dataset. Finally, the paper outlines the observed trade-off between recall and fallout.
U2 - 10.3390/electronics9101684
DO - 10.3390/electronics9101684
M3 - Article
VL - 9
JO - Electronics
JF - Electronics
SN - 2079-9292
IS - 10
ER -