Towards an immunity-based anomaly detection system for network traffic

Abstract

This paper proposes an immunity-based anomaly detection system for network traffic. The system is inspired by the specificity and diversity of the immune system; the system has a user-specific agent for every user, and diverse agents make a decision whether network traffic is normal or abnormal. The system makes use of multiple user profiles, which account for normal user traffic, while conventional anomaly detections have used only the single user profile. The use of multiple profiles leads to an improvement in detection accuracy. In addition, this paper proposes an evaluation framework for the immunity-based anomaly detection system. The evaluation framework is capable of evaluating the differences in detection accuracy between internal and external anomalies. In experiments, the immunity-based method outperformed the conventional method. For internal masquerader detection, the average false acceptance rate was 11.21% with no false alarms. For virus detection, four random-scanning worms and the simulated metaserver worm were detected with no false acceptances and no false alarms, while a simulated passive worm was successfully detected on some of accounts.