TL-NID: Deep Neural Network with Transfer Learning for Network Intrusion Detection

Network intrusion detection systems (NIDSs) play an essential role in the defense of computer networks by identifying a computer networks' unauthorized access and investigating potential security breaches. Traditional NIDSs encounters difficulties to combat newly created sophisticated and unpredictable security attacks. Hence, there is an increasing need for automatic intrusion detection solution that can detect malicious activities more accurately and prevent high false alarm rates (FPR). In this paper, we propose a novel network intrusion detection framework using a deep neural network based on the pretrained VGG-16 architecture. The framework, TL-NID (Transfer Learning for Network Intrusion Detection), is a two-step process where features are extracted in the first step, using VGG-16 pre-trained on ImageNet dataset and in the 2nd step a deep neural network is applied to the extracted features for classification. We applied TL-NID on NSL-KDD, a benchmark dataset for network intrusion, to evaluate the performance of the proposed framework. The experimental results show that our proposed method can effectively learn from the NSL-KDD dataset with producing a realistic performance in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, and false alarm. This study also aims to motivate security researchers to exploit different state-of-the-art pre-trained models for network intrusion detection problems through valuable knowledge transfer.