Unknown Security Attack Detection Using Shallow and Deep ANN Classifiers

Advancements in machine learning and artificial intelligence have been widely utilised in the security domain, including but not limited to intrusion detection techniques. With the large training datasets of modern traffic, intelligent algorithms and powerful machine learning tools, security researchers have been able to greatly improve on the intrusion detection models and enhance their ability to detect malicious traffic more accurately. Nonetheless, the problem of detecting completely unknown security attacks is still an open area of research. The enormous number of newly developed attacks constitutes an eccentric challenge for all types of intrusion detection systems. Additionally, the lack of a standard definition of what constitutes an unknown security attack in the literature and the industry alike adds to the problem. In this paper, the researchers reviewed the studies on detecting unknown attacks over the past 10 years and found that they tended to use inconsistent definitions. This formulates the need for a standard consistent definition to have comparable results. The researchers proposed a new categorisation of two types of unknown attacks, namely Type-A, which represents a completely new category of unknown attacks, and Type-B, which represents unknown attacks within already known categories of attacks. The researchers conducted several experiments and evaluated modern intrusion detection systems based on shallow and deep artificial neural network models and their ability to detect Type-A and Type-B attacks using two well-known benchmark datasets for network intrusion detection. The research problem was studied as both a binary and multi-class classification problem. The results showed that the evaluated models had poor overall generalisation error measures, where the classification error rate in detecting several types of unknown attacks from 92 experiments was 50.09%, which highlights the need for new approaches and techniques to address this problem.