Anomaly-Based Intrusion Detection System

Anomaly-based network intrusion detection plays a vital role in protecting networks against malicious activities. In recent years, data mining techniques have gained importance in addressing security issues in network. Intrusion detection systems (IDS) aim to identify intrusions with a low false alarm rate and a high detection rate. Although classification-based data mining techniques are popular, they are not effective to detect unknown attacks. Unsupervised learning methods have been given a closer look for network IDS, which are insignificant to detect dynamic intrusion activities. The recent contributions in literature focus on machine learning techniques to build anomaly-based intrusion detection systems, which extract the knowledge from training phase. Though existing intrusion detection techniques address the latest types of attacks like DoS, Probe, U2R, and R2L, reducing false alarm rate is a challenging issue. Most network IDS depend on the deployed environment. Hence, developing a system which is independent of the deployed environment with fast and appropriate feature selection method is a challenging issue. The exponential growth of zero-day attacks emphasizing the need of security mechanisms which can accurately detect previously unknown attacks is another challenging task. In this work, an attempt is made to develop generic meta-heuristic scale for both known and unknown attacks with a high detection rate and low false alarm rate by adopting efficient feature optimization techniques.