Performance analysis and feature selection for network-based intrusion detection with deep learning

An intrusion detection system is an automated monitoring tool that analyzes network traffic and detects malicious activities by looking out either for known patterns of attacks or for an anomaly. In this study, intrusion detection and classification performances of different deep learning based systems are examined. For this purpose, 24 deep neural networks with four different architectures are trained and evaluated on CICIDS2017 dataset. Furthermore, the best performing model is utilized to inspect raw network traffic features and rank them with respect to their contributions to success rates. By selecting features with respect to their ranks, sets of varying size from 3 to 77 are assessed in terms of classification accuracy and time efficiency. The results show that recurrent neural networks with a certain level of complexity can achieve comparable success rates with state-of-the-art systems using a small feature set of size 9; while the average time required to classify a test sample is halved compared to the complete set.