Improving the Performance of Machine Learning-Based Network Intrusion Detection Systems on the UNSW-NB15 Dataset

Abstract

Networks are exposed to an increasing number of cyberattacks due to their vulnerabilities. So, cybersecurity strives to make networks as safe as possible, by introducing defense systems to detect any suspicious activities. However, firewalls and classical intrusion detection systems (IDSs) suffer from continuous updating of their defined databases to detect threats. The new directions of the IDSs aim to leverage the machine learning models to design more robust systems with higher detection rates and lower false alarm rates. This research presents a novel network IDS, which plays an important role in network security and faces the current cyberattacks on networks using the UNSW-NB15 dataset benchmark. Our proposed system is a dynamically scalable multiclass machine learning-based network IDS. It consists of several stages based on supervised machine learning. It starts with the Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) method to solve the imbalanced classes problem in the dataset and then selects the important features for each class existing in the dataset by the Gini Impurity criterion using the Extremely Randomized Trees Classifier (Extra Trees Classifier). After that, a pretrained extreme learning machine (ELM) model is responsible for detecting the attacks separately, “One-Versus-All” as a binary classifier for each of them. Finally, the ELM classifier outputs become the inputs to a fully connected layer in order to learn from all their combinations, followed by a logistic regression layer to make soft decisions for all classes. Results show that our proposed system performs better than related works in terms of accuracy, false alarm rate, Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC), and Precision-Recall Curves (PRCs).