An Improved Reptile Search Algorithm Based on Cauchy Mutation for Intrusion Detection

Abstract

With the growth of the discipline of digital communication, the topic has acquired more attention in the cybersecurity medium. The Intrusion Detection (ID) system monitors network traffic to detect malicious activities. The paper introduces a novel Feature Selection (FS) approach for ID. Reptile Search Algorithm (RSA)—is a new optimization algorithm; in this method, each agent searches a new region according to the position of the host, which makes the algorithm suffers from getting stuck in local optima and a slow convergence rate. To overcome these problems, this study introduces an improved RSA approach by integrating Cauchy Mutation (CM) into the RSA’s structure. Thus, the CM can effectively expand search space and enhance the performance of the RSA. The developed RSA-CM is assessed on five publicly available ID datasets: KDD-CUP99, NSL-KDD, UNSW-NB15, CIC-IDS2017, and CIC-IDS2018 and two engineering problems. The RSA-CM is compared with the original RSA, and three other state-of-the-art FS methods, namely particle swarm optimization, grey wolf optimization, and multi-verse optimizer, and quantitatively is evaluated using fitness value, the number of selected optimum features, accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score evaluation measures. The results reveal that the developed RSA-CM got better results than the other competitive methods applied for FS on the ID datasets and the examined engineering problems. Moreover, the Friedman test results confirm that RSA-CM has a significant superiority compared to other methods as an FS method for ID.