Introduction

Signature-based Intrusion detection systems are not suitable anymore to be used in nowadays network environment. Because signature-based models are not able to detect new threats and unknown attacks. Due to technology improvement, the number of attacks is increasing exponentially. Statistics show that attacks number increases with a rate of 100% each year causing huge money loss, about tens of millions of dollars for ransomware attacks only. This high number of millions of new threats that are developed every day, reduces the effectiveness of signature-based IDS because it is not a practical solution to update the signatures databases every few minutes. Anomaly-based IDS can be a better alternative of signature-based IDS because it is more suitable for nowadays challenges of new threats. Because it can detect new threats but still not practically used because of its high false-positive rate. The reason behind the high false-positive rate is that anomaly model classifies an unseen pattern that did not learn it in normal cases, as an abnormal case. The reason behind high false-positive is that the model has overfitting what means it cannot generalize. The solution may seem easy, by extending the training dataset to include all normal cases. But that still not a practical solution for a long time. Although we can add much more normal cases to datasets, we still need a model with higher ability of generalization. In this paper, we propose using deep learning with big data to solve this problem. Big data allows us to use big datasets for training to reduce the false-positive rate by including much more normal cases. And deep learning needs large datasets for training without facing the overfitting problem as it may have more ability to generalize than traditional learning models. We compare results with one of the best traditional learning used classifiers on the NSL-KDD benchmark dataset. Results show reducing false-positive to lower 10% than already used classifiers.

The paper is organized as follows, we will talk about related works in "Related Work Section". The proposed method is explained in detail in "Method Section". "Data Section" contains detailed information about used dataset. We will discuss results in "Results and Discussion Section". We will talk about conclusion and future vision in "Conclusion and Future Work Section".

Related work

To optimize IDS, there are two general resolving directions. First way is to collect more data. Network security data and intrusion data are hard to collect because of data privacy concerns. In addition to the challenges of labeling data, which may be time-consuming for experts to do explanations and labeling process. Second way is studying how to increase the performance on small datasets, which is very important because the insights we can get from such researches can be implemented in big data researches. This paper is considered under the second way. We propose implementing deep learning instead of traditional learning. We choose to compare our works with SVM, shown in Fig. 1. Because SVM is the most popular traditional learning model used in network security and intrusion detection systems along years even in the era of big data. SVM has received a lot of interest in IDS optimization domain because it has proved by lots of experiments that it is one of the best classifiers in anomaly-based intrusion detection systems [1,2,3,4,5]

Fig. 1
figure 1

SVM [6]. Shows the main concept of SVM. Its margins and support vectors

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Find Table 1 from [1], that contains research experiments that used basically SVM and optimized it by adding another model to its result or to its input.

Table 1 Comparisons between Researches used SVM as basic Classifier
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Method

The problem of any anomaly model is high false-positive rate, because it classifies any unseen pattern as abnormal where it may be a normal pattern but not included in the training set. Having a big training dataset that includes all possible normal cases has been considered as a theoretical idea that could not be applied in practice. Although we can increase the number of training samples to include much more normal cases, still we need a model that has more ability to generalize. We propose deep learning model instead of traditional learning as it may have more ability to generalize.

The proposed solution is to use a big data training set, but also to use a deep learning model to solve overfitting problem that occurs on the traditional learning models.

We have done many experiments [26] that we care about collective and contextual attacks. Where we chose using a deep network with type of recurrent so we can handle sequences of actions or events. We chose LSTM to deal with sequences of inputs and focus on context.

We were curious if LSTM can also achieve better results on small benchmark datasets or not. So we applied this experiment, we do not use sequences or even big data in this experiment. Only small benchmark data is used with LSTM.

Proposed algorithm-long short term memory(LSTM)

LSTM is type of Deep Learning Recurrent Neural Network (RNN). see Fig. 2. RNN is extension of a convention feed-forward neural network. Unlike feedforward neural networks, RNN have cyclic connections making them powerful for modeling sequences. As a human no one think of each event separately. For example, when you are reading this article you read each word but you understand it in the context of this article, so that you understand the whole concept of this paper. That is the idea of RNN that has a loop to deal with input as a sequence, and that what we need to handle each event on network within its context.

Fig. 2
figure 2

RNN have Loops [27]. Shows simple diagram of recurrent neural networks

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LSTM is a special case of RNN that solves problems faced by the RNN model [27, 28]

  1. 1.

    Long term dependency problem in RNNs.

  2. 2.

    Vanishing Gradient & Exploding Gradient

LSTM is designed to overcome vanishing gradient descent because it avoids long-term dependency problem. To remember information for long periods of time, each common hidden node is replaced by LSTM cell. Each LSTM cell consists of three main gates such as input gate it, forget gate ft, and output gate ot. Besides ct is cell state at time t.

LSTM architecture is shown in Fig. 3, LSTM cell is shown in Fig. 4.

Fig. 3
figure 3

LSTM architecture [39]. Shows in details architecture of long short term memory

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Fig. 4
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LSTM cell [29]. Shows in details architecture of long short term memory

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Figure 5 shows the equations to calculate the values of gates

Fig. 5
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LSTM cell equations [38]. Shows in details equations of LSTM Cell

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where xt, ℎt, and ct correspond to input layer, hidden layer, and cell state at time t. Besides, bi, bf, bc, and bo are bias at input gate, forget gate, cell state, and output gate, respectively. Furthermore, σ is sigmoid function. Finally, W is denoted by weight matrix

Experiment setup

This experiment is performed on Google CoLab [30] using Keras libary (Python Deep Learning library) [31]. We apply LSTM of 64 hidden nodes with Relu activation function and dropout = 0.5. Using binary cross-entropy loss function. Using RMSprop optimizer. Learning rate = 0.001, rho = 0.9, decay = 0.0.

Data

KDD99

This dataset is an updated version of the DARPA98 by processing the tcpdump portion. it was constructed in 1999 by the international competition, International Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Tools Competition. Its size is 708 MB and it contains about 5 million connections [32]. It contains different attacks such as Neptune-DoS, pod-DoS, SmurfDoS, and buffer-overflow. The benign and attack traffic are merged together in a simulated environment but it contains a large number of redundant records [33]

KDD99 is the most famous research dataset but it cannot be used for real-life applications as data is old, not real, not enough. Statistics details are provided in Table 2 and Table 3.

Statistics about KDD training set

Table 2 Statistics about KDD training set [33]
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Statistics about KDD testing set

Table 3 Statistics about KDD testing set [33]
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NSL-KDD

This dataset is available online on website of Canadian Research for Intrusion detection [34]

NSL-KDD is built by resampling KDD99 to solve all its drawbacks that reduce the precision of mining algorithms on it. Resampling is done by removing duplicated samples and redundant samples. As KDD training set has 78% of duplicated samples and testing set has 75% of duplicated samples that result to bias detection to detect attacks that have more number of samples and make it hard to learn attacks that have small number of samples but may be one most dangerous attacks, such as U2R, L2R.

NSL _KDD advantages

  • It does not contain redundant samples in testing samples so that solves bias problem

  • It does not contain duplicate records in the test set which have better reduction rates.

  • All samples for any attack type has the same percentage of its number in KDD.

  • It contains 21 attacks in training dataset and 37 attacks in testing dataset so we can test the unknown attacks detection capability of a model by testing on attacks that some of them are new for the model as they were not in training set [3, 33] .

NSL statistics

Statistics about NSL_KDD training and testing datasets in Figs. 6, 7.

Fig. 6
figure 6

Statistics about NSL-KDD testing dataset [3]. Shows Statistics about NSL-KDD training datasets. Statistics about number of samples for each type of attack

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Fig. 7
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Statistics about NSL-KDD training dataset [3]. Shows Statistics about NSL-KDD testing datasets. Statistics about number of samples for each type of attack

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Where x-axes represent attacks types, y-axes represent number of samples.

NSL-KDD is not biased but that does not mean that it is optimal. It has many drawbacks, but still more effective than other available datasets. At least, it will become out-of-date after few months as developing technologies and new attacks appear every day.

Type of attacks available in NSL-KDD

NSL-KDD contains 37 types of attacks that are categorized into 6 basic categories.

Categories are DoS, R2L, U2R, Probe, Normal, Unknown. Find details in Table 4.

Table 4 Type of attacks available in NSL-KDD [3]
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NSL-KDD attributes

NSL-KDD contains 41 attributes as we can find in Fig. 8 [35].

Fig. 8
figure 8

NSL KDD features [34]. Shows features of NSL-KDD dataset

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Results and discussion

We will not discuss that big data is better with deep learning than traditional learning. It is a fact that the most important difference between deep learning and traditional machine learning is its performance as the scale of data increases. As we can see in Fig. 9 [36].

Fig. 9
figure 9

Big data with deep learning performance optimization [36, 37]. Shows performance optimization when using bigger amount of data

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We did not use a big dataset in this experiment. We used a small dataset as we want to compare the results of applying deep learning instead of traditional learning in anomaly-based IDS even on small dataset. Thus, we can compare optimization of generalization. We got by experiment, that accuracy increases by using deep learning model instead of traditional learning model. Moreover, false positive is getting lower by 10% less than traditional learning models. Results are shown in Table 5.

Table 5 Comparing false-positive of Deep vs SVM on NSL-KDD Benchmark
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We used SVM to compare with, because it has one of the highest results among traditional learning classifiers. The result we get is higher than all previous studies we have shown in related works.

Conclusion and future work

Using big data analysis with deep learning in anomaly detection shows excellent combination that may be optimal solution as deep learning needs millions of samples in dataset and that what big data handle and what we need to construct big model of normal behavior that reduce false-positive rate to be better than small traditional anomaly models.

We recommend using deep learning models instead of SVM when trying to build hybrid classifiers for IDS. Because, as we see in results, deep models have more ability to generalize than traditional models. Thus, deep models achieve better results on unseen data causing less false-positive rate. We recommend using LSTM as we think it is an optimal solution in security domain because it can deal with sequences of events and context. So that it cannot only achieve better accuracy, but also can detect more various types of attacks that were not possible before. Such as, contextual and collective attacks.