Using a Long Short-Term Memory Recurrent Neural Network (LSTM-RNN) to Classify Network Attacks

An intrusion detection system (IDS) identifies whether the network traffic behavior is normal or abnormal or identifies the attack types. Recently, deep learning has emerged as a successful approach in IDSs, having a high accuracy rate with its distinctive learning mechanism<b>. </b>In t...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Pramita Sree Muhuri, Prosenjit Chatterjee, Xiaohong Yuan, Kaushik Roy, Albert Esterline
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2020-05-01
Series:Information
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2078-2489/11/5/243
Description
Summary:An intrusion detection system (IDS) identifies whether the network traffic behavior is normal or abnormal or identifies the attack types. Recently, deep learning has emerged as a successful approach in IDSs, having a high accuracy rate with its distinctive learning mechanism<b>. </b>In this research, we developed a new method for intrusion detection to classify the NSL-KDD dataset by combining a genetic algorithm (GA) for optimal feature selection and long short-term memory (LSTM) with a recurrent neural network (RNN). We found that using LSTM-RNN classifiers with the optimal feature set improves intrusion detection. The performance of the IDS was analyzed by calculating the accuracy, recall, precision, f-score, and confusion matrix. The NSL-KDD dataset was used to analyze the performances of the classifiers. An LSTM-RNN was used to classify the NSL-KDD datasets into binary (normal and abnormal) and multi-class (Normal, DoS, Probing, U2R, and R2L) sets. The results indicate that applying the GA increases the classification accuracy of LSTM-RNN in both binary and multi-class classification. The results of the LSTM-RNN classifier were also compared with the results using a support vector machine (SVM) and random forest (RF). For multi-class classification, the classification accuracy of LSTM-RNN with the GA model is much higher than SVM and RF. For binary classification, the classification accuracy of LSTM-RNN is similar to that of RF and higher than that of SVM.
ISSN:2078-2489