An Improved Design for a Cloud Intrusion Detection System Using Hybrid Features Selection Approach with ML Classifier

Abstract

The rapid adoption of cloud computing has introduced new security concerns, particularly regarding data privacy and protection from sophisticated cyberattacks. Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) based on Machine Learning (ML) offer improved detection of malicious behaviour in network traffic. However, existing IDS solutions struggle with large-dimensional data and imbalanced datasets, resulting in higher false positive rates (FPR) and reduced detection rates (DR). In this paper, we propose an improved Cloud IDS leveraging a hybrid features selection approach using Information Gain (IG), Chi-square (CS), and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). To address the challenge of imbalanced datasets, the Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique (SMOTE) is employed. The Random Forest (RF) classifier is used to detect and classify attacks. The system is evaluated on the UNSW-NB15 and Kyoto datasets, achieving accuracies of over 98% and 99%, respectively, outperforming other methods in terms of detection accuracy.