The widespread acceptance and increase of the Internet and mobile technologies have revolutionized our existence. On the other hand, the world is witnessing and suffering due to technologically aided crime methods. These threats, including but not limited to hacking and intrusions and are the main concern for security experts. Nevertheless, the challenges facing effective intrusion detection methods continue closely associated with the researcher’s interests. This paper’s main contribution is to present a host-based intrusion detection system using a C4.5-based detector on top of the popular Consolidated Tree Construction (CTC) algorithm, which works efficiently in the presence of class-imbalanced data. An improved version of the random sampling mechanism called Supervised Relative Random Sampling (SRRS) has been proposed to generate a balanced sample from a high-class imbalanced dataset at the detector’s pre-processing stage. Moreover, an improved multi-class feature selection mechanism has been designed and developed as a filter component to generate the IDS datasets’ ideal outstanding features for efficient intrusion detection. The proposed IDS has been validated with state-of-the-art intrusion detection systems. The results show an accuracy of 99.96% and 99.95%, considering the NSL-KDD dataset and the CICIDS2017 dataset using 34 features.

Supervised learning and pattern recognition is a crucial area of research in information retrieval, knowledge engineering, image processing, medical imaging, and intrusion detection. Numerous algorithms have been designed to address such complex application domains. Despite an enormous array of supervised classifiers, researchers are yet to recognize a robust classification mechanism that accurately and quickly classifies the target dataset, especially in the field of intrusion detection systems (IDSs). Most of the existing literature considers the accuracy and false-positive rate for assessing the performance of classification algorithms. The absence of other performance measures, such as model build time, misclassification rate, and precision, should be considered the main limitation for classifier performance evaluation. This paper’s main contribution is to analyze the current literature status in the field of network intrusion detection, highlighting the number of classifiers used, dataset size, performance outputs, inferences, and research gaps. Therefore, fifty-four state-of-the-art classifiers of various different groups, i.e., Bayes, functions, lazy, rule-based, and decision tree, have been analyzed and explored in detail, considering the sixteen most popular performance measures. This research work aims to recognize a robust classifier, which is suitable for consideration as the base learner, while designing a host-based or network-based intrusion detection system. The NSLKDD, ISCXIDS2012, and CICIDS2017 datasets have been used for training and testing purposes. Furthermore, a widespread decision-making algorithm, referred to as Techniques for Order Preference by Similarity to the Ideal Solution (TOPSIS), allocated ranks to the classifiers based on observed performance reading on the concern datasets. The J48Consolidated provided the highest accuracy of 99.868%, a misclassification rate of 0.1319%, and a Kappa value of 0.998. Therefore, this classifier has been proposed as the ideal classifier for designing IDSs.

This paper explores the immunological model and implements it in the domain of intrusion detection on computer networks. The main objective of the paper is to monitor, log the network traffic and apply detection algorithms for detecting intrusions within the network. The proposed model mimics the natural Immune System (IS) by considering both of its layers, innate immune system and adaptive immune system respectively. The current work proposes Statistical Modeling based Anomaly Detection (SMAD) as the first layer of Intrusion Detection System (IDS). It works as the Innate Immune System (IIS) interface and captures the initial traffic of a network to find out the first-hand vulnerability. The second layer, Adaptive Immune-based Anomaly Detection (AIAD) has been considered for determining the features of the suspicious network packets for detection of anomaly. It imitates the adaptive immune system by taking into consideration the activation of the T-cells and the B-cells. It captures relevant features from header and payload portions for effective detection of intrusion. Experiments have been conducted on both the real-time network traffic and the standard datasets KDD99 and UNSW-NB15 for intrusion detection. The SMAD model yields as high as 96.04% true positive rate and around 97% true positive rate using real-time traffic and standard data sets. Highly suspicious traffic detected in the SMAD model is further tested for vulnerability in the AIAD model. Results show significant true positive rate, closer to almost 99% of accurately detecting the file-based and user-based anomalies for both the real-time traffic and standard data sets.