CNN-Based Network Intrusion Detection against Denial-of-Service Attacks

Abstract

As cyberattacks become more intelligent, it is challenging to detect advanced attacks in a variety of fields including industry, national defense, and healthcare. Traditional intrusion detection systems are no longer enough to detect these advanced attacks with unexpected patterns. Attackers bypass known signatures and pretend to be normal users. Deep learning is an alternative to solving these issues. Deep Learning (DL)-based intrusion detection does not require a lot of attack signatures or the list of normal behaviors to generate detection rules. DL defines intrusion features by itself through training empirical data. We develop a DL-based intrusion model especially focusing on denial of service (DoS) attacks. For the intrusion dataset, we use KDD CUP 1999 dataset (KDD), the most widely used dataset for the evaluation of intrusion detection systems (IDS). KDD consists of four types of attack categories, such as DoS, user to root (U2R), remote to local (R2L), and probing. Numerous KDD studies have been employing machine learning and classifying the dataset into the four categories or into two categories such as attack and benign. Rather than focusing on the broad categories, we focus on various attacks belonging to same category. Unlike other categories of KDD, the DoS category has enough samples for training each attack. In addition to KDD, we use CSE-CIC-IDS2018 which is the most up-to-date IDS dataset. CSE-CIC-IDS2018 consists of more advanced DoS attacks than that of KDD. In this work, we focus on the DoS category of both datasets and develop a DL model for DoS detection. We develop our model based on a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and evaluate its performance through comparison with an Recurrent Neural Network (RNN). Furthermore, we suggest the optimal CNN design for the better performance through numerous experiments.