Data Mining in Cyber Threat Analysis – Neural Networks for Intrusion Detection

The most important features and constraints of the commercial intrusion detection (IDS) and prevention (IPS) systems and the possibility of application of artificial intelligence and neural networks such as IDS or IPS were investigated. A neural network was trained using the Levenberg-Marquardt backpropagation algorithm and applied on the Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD)’99 [14] reference dataset. A very high (99.9985%) accuracy and rather low (3.006%) false alert rate was achieved, but only at the expense of high memory consumption and low computation speed. To overcome these limitations, the selection of training data size was investigated. Result shows that a neural network trained on ca. 50,000 data is enough to achieve a detection accuracy of 99.82%.