A Predictive Model to Predict Cyberattack Using Self-Normalizing Neural Networks

Cyberattack is a never-ending war that has greatly threatened secured information systems. The development of automated and intelligent systems provides more computing power to hackers to steal information, destroy data or system resources, and has raised global security issues. Statistical and Data mining tools have received continuous research and improvements. These tools have been adopted to create sophisticated intrusion detection systems that help information systems mitigate and defend against cyberattacks. However, the advancement in technology and accessibility of information makes more identifiable elements that can be used to gain unauthorized access to systems and resources. Data mining and classification tools such as K-Nearest Neighbors, Support vector machines, and Decision trees, among others, have been improved over time and used to build models for intrusion detection systems. This enables information systems, internet-connected devices, or devices running on a computer network to gain immunity against cyberattacks. However, these classification models hit some limitations as the sample size of data increases. Neural networks is an artificial intelligence tool that has been in active research over recent years. It has proven to handle big data and understand complex relationships better than the previous classification methods. Recent studies have demonstrated to build better models by showing better accuracy for intrusion detection systems using neural networks. In this thesis, we use a class of neural networks known as Self-Normalizing Neural Networks, which implements a scaled exponential linear unit activation function (SELU) developed by Klambauer et al. [12], to build a predictive model to detect cyberattacks against normal network traffic or connections using classification, in the KDD CUP 99 dataset from the Third International Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Tools Competition, that was held in 1999. The accuracy and precision of the self-normalizing neural networks is compared with that of the k-nearest neighbors and support vector machines. The self-normalizing neural network appears to perform better. It is an excellent classifier for denial-of-service attacks, probe attacks, and user-to-root attacks while efficiently predicting normal connection. The result in this thesis is also compared with existing literature which appears to perform better

AI Solutions for MDS: Artificial Intelligence Techniques for Misuse Detection and Localisation in Telecommunication Environments

This report considers the application of Articial Intelligence (AI) techniques to the problem of misuse detection and misuse localisation within telecommunications environments. A broad survey of techniques is provided, that covers inter alia rule based systems, model-based systems, case based reasoning, pattern matching, clustering and feature extraction, articial neural networks, genetic algorithms, arti cial immune systems, agent based systems, data mining and a variety of hybrid approaches. The report then considers the central issue of event correlation, that is at the heart of many misuse detection and localisation systems. The notion of being able to infer misuse by the correlation of individual temporally distributed events within a multiple data stream environment is explored, and a range of techniques, covering model based approaches, `programmed' AI and machine learning paradigms. It is found that, in general, correlation is best achieved via rule based approaches, but that these suffer from a number of drawbacks, such as the difculty of developing and maintaining an appropriate knowledge base, and the lack of ability to generalise from known misuses to new unseen misuses. Two distinct approaches are evident. One attempts to encode knowledge of known misuses, typically within rules, and use this to screen events. This approach cannot generally detect misuses for which it has not been programmed, i.e. it is prone to issuing false negatives. The other attempts to `learn' the features of event patterns that constitute normal behaviour, and, by observing patterns that do not match expected behaviour, detect when a misuse has occurred. This approach is prone to issuing false positives, i.e. inferring misuse from innocent patterns of behaviour that the system was not trained to recognise. Contemporary approaches are seen to favour hybridisation, often combining detection or localisation mechanisms for both abnormal and normal behaviour, the former to capture known cases of misuse, the latter to capture unknown cases. In some systems, these mechanisms even work together to update each other to increase detection rates and lower false positive rates. It is concluded that hybridisation offers the most promising future direction, but that a rule or state based component is likely to remain, being the most natural approach to the correlation of complex events. The challenge, then, is to mitigate the weaknesses of canonical programmed systems such that learning, generalisation and adaptation are more readily facilitated

Intrusion Detection System using Bayesian Network Modeling

Computer Network Security has become a critical and important issue due to ever increasing cyber-crimes. Cybercrimes are spanning from simple piracy crimes to information theft in international terrorism. Defence security agencies and other militarily related organizations are highly concerned about the confidentiality and access control of the stored data. Therefore, it is really important to investigate on Intrusion Detection System (IDS) to detect and prevent cybercrimes to protect these systems. This research proposes a novel distributed IDS to detect and prevent attacks such as denial service, probes, user to root and remote to user attacks. In this work, we propose an IDS based on Bayesian network classification modelling technique. Bayesian networks are popular for adaptive learning, modelling diversity network traffic data for meaningful classification details. The proposed model has an anomaly based IDS with an adaptive learning process. Therefore, Bayesian networks have been applied to build a robust and accurate IDS. The proposed IDS has been evaluated against the KDD DAPRA dataset which was designed for network IDS evaluation. The research methodology consists of four different Bayesian networks as classification models, where each of these classifier models are interconnected and communicated to predict on incoming network traffic data. Each designed Bayesian network model is capable of detecting a major category of attack such as denial of service (DoS). However, all four Bayesian networks work together to pass the information of the classification model to calibrate the IDS system. The proposed IDS shows the ability of detecting novel attacks by continuing learning with different datasets. The testing dataset constructed by sampling the original KDD dataset to contain balance number of attacks and normal connections. The experiments show that the proposed system is effective in detecting attacks in the test dataset and is highly accurate in detecting all major attacks recorded in DARPA dataset. The proposed IDS consists with a promising approach for anomaly based intrusion detection in distributed systems. Furthermore, the practical implementation of the proposed IDS system can be utilized to train and detect attacks in live network traffi

Intrusion Detection Systems Using Adaptive Regression Splines

Past few years have witnessed a growing recognition of intelligent techniques for the construction of efficient and reliable intrusion detection systems. Due to increasing incidents of cyber attacks, building effective intrusion detection systems (IDS) are essential for protecting information systems security, and yet it remains an elusive goal and a great challenge. In this paper, we report a performance analysis between Multivariate Adaptive Regression Splines (MARS), neural networks and support vector machines. The MARS procedure builds flexible regression models by fitting separate splines to distinct intervals of the predictor variables. A brief comparison of different neural network learning algorithms is also given

A cognitive based Intrusion detection system

Intrusion detection is one of the primary mechanisms to provide computer networks with security. With an increase in attacks and growing dependence on various fields such as medicine, commercial, and engineering to give services over a network, securing networks have become a significant issue. The purpose of Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) is to make models which can recognize regular communications from abnormal ones and take necessary actions. Among different methods in this field, Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) have been widely used. However, ANN-based IDS, has two main disadvantages: 1- Low detection precision. 2- Weak detection stability. To overcome these issues, this paper proposes a new approach based on Deep Neural Network (DNN. The general mechanism of our model is as follows: first, some of the data in dataset is properly ranked, afterwards, dataset is normalized with Min-Max normalizer to fit in the limited domain. Then dimensionality reduction is applied to decrease the amount of both useless dimensions and computational cost. After the preprocessing part, Mean-Shift clustering algorithm is the used to create different subsets and reduce the complexity of dataset. Based on each subset, two models are trained by Support Vector Machine (SVM) and deep learning method. Between two models for each subset, the model with a higher accuracy is chosen. This idea is inspired from philosophy of divide and conquer. Hence, the DNN can learn each subset quickly and robustly. Finally, to reduce the error from the previous step, an ANN model is trained to gain and use the results in order to be able to predict the attacks. We can reach to 95.4 percent of accuracy. Possessing a simple structure and less number of tunable parameters, the proposed model still has a grand generalization with a high level of accuracy in compared to other methods such as SVM, Bayes network, and STL.Comment: 18 pages, 6 figure