Intelligent and Improved Self-Adaptive Anomaly based Intrusion Detection System for Networks

Abstract

With the advent of digital technology, computer networks have developed rapidly at an unprecedented pace contributing tremendously to social and economic development. They have become the backbone for all critical sectors and all the top Multi-National companies. Unfortunately, security threats for computer networks have increased dramatically over the last decade being much brazen and bolder. Intrusions or attacks on computers and networks are activities or attempts to jeopardize main system security objectives, which called as confidentiality, integrity and availability. They lead mostly in great financial losses, massive sensitive data leaks, thereby decreasing efficiency and the quality of productivity of an organization. There is a great need for an effective Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS), which are security tools designed to interpret the intrusion attempts in incoming network traffic, thereby achieving a solid line of protection against inside and outside intruders. In this work, we propose to optimize a very popular soft computing tool prevalently used for intrusion detection namely Back Propagation Neural Network (BPNN) using a novel machine learning framework called “ISAGASAA”, based on Improved Self-Adaptive Genetic Algorithm (ISAGA) and Simulated Annealing Algorithm (SAA). ISAGA is our variant of standard Genetic Algorithm (GA), which is developed based on GA improved through an Adaptive Mutation Algorithm (AMA) and optimization strategies. The optimization strategies carried out are Parallel Processing (PP) and Fitness Value Hashing (FVH) that reduce execution time, convergence time and save processing power. While, SAA was incorporated to ISAGA in order to optimize its heuristic search. Experimental results based on Kyoto University benchmark dataset version 2015 demonstrate that our optimized NIDS based BPNN called “ANID BPNN-ISAGASAA” outperforms several state-of-art approaches in terms of detection rate and false positive rate. Moreover, improvement of GA through FVH and PP saves processing power and execution time. Thus, our model is very much convenient for network anomaly detection.