Analysis, design, and comparison of machine-learning techniques for networking intrusion detection

The use of machine-learning techniques is becoming more and more frequent in solving all those problems where it is difficult to rationally interpret the process of interest. Intrusion detection in networked systems is a problem in which, although it is not fundamental to interpret the measures that one is able to obtain from a process, it is important to obtain an answer from a classification algorithm if the network traffic is characterized by anomalies (and hence, there is a high probability of an intrusion) or not. Due to the increased adoption of SW-defined autonomous systems that are distributed and interconnected, the probability of a cyber attack is increased, as well as its consequence in terms of system reliability, availability, and even safety. In this work, we present the application of different machine-learning models to the problem of anomaly classification in the context of local area network (LAN) traffic analysis. In particular, we present the application of a K-nearest neighbors (KNN) and of an artificial neural network (ANN) to realize an algorithm for intrusion detection systems (IDS). The dataset used in this work is representative of the communication traffic in common LAN networks in military application in particular typical US Air Force LAN. This work presents a training phase of the different models based on a multidimensional-scaling preprocessing procedure, based on different metrics, to provide higher performance and generalization with respect to model prediction capability. The obtained results of KNN and ANN classifiers are compared with respect to a commonly used index of performance for classifiers evaluation.