Fusion of Feature Selection and Random Forest for an Anomaly-Based Intrusion Detection System

Abstract

Considering current network scenario hackers and intruders has become a big threat today. As new technologies are emerging fast, extensive use of these technologies and computers, what plays an important role is security. Most of the computers in network can be easily compromised with attacks. Big issue of concern is increase in new type of attack these days. Security to the sensitive data is very big threat to deal with, it need to consider as high priority issue which should be addressed immediately. Highly efficient Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) are available now a days which detects various types of attacks on network. But we require the IDS which is intelligent enough to detect and analyze all type of new threats on the network. Maximum accuracy is expected by any of this intelligent intrusion detection system. An Intrusion Detection System can be hardware or software that analyze and monitors all activities of network to detect malicious activities happened inside the network. It also informs and helps administrator to deal with malicious packets, which if enters in network can harm more number of computers connected together. In our work we have implemented an intellectual IDS which helps administrator to analyze real time network traffic. IDS does it by classifying packets entering into the system as normal or malicious. This paper mainly focus on techniques used for feature selection to reduce number of features from KDD-99 dataset. This paper also explains algorithm used for classification i.e., Random Forest which works with forest of trees to classify real time packet as normal or malicious. Random forest makes use of ensembling techniques to give final output which is derived by combining output from number of trees used to create forest. Dataset which is used while performing experiments is KDD-99. This dataset is used to train all trees to get more accuracy with help of random forest. From results achieved we can observe that random forest algorithm gives more accuracy in distributed network with reduced false alarm rate.