In recent years, machine learning-based intrusion detection systems (IDSs) have proven to be effective; especially, deep neural networks improve the detection rates of intrusion detection models. However, as models become more and more complex, people can hardly get the explanations behind their decisions. At the same time, most of the works about model interpretation focuses on other fields like computer vision, natural language processing, and biology. This leads to the fact that in practical use, cybersecurity experts can hardly optimize their decisions according to the judgments of the model. To solve these issues, a framework is proposed in this paper to give an explanation for IDSs. This framework uses SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP), and combines local and global explanations to improve the interpretation of IDSs. The local explanations give the reasons why the model makes certain decisions on the specific input. The global explanations give the important features extracted from IDSs, present the relationships between the feature values and different types of attacks. At the same time, the interpretations between two different classifiers, one-vs-all classifier and multiclass classifier, are compared. NSL-KDD dataset is used to test the feasibility of the framework. The framework proposed in this paper leads to improve the transparency of any IDS, and helps the cybersecurity staff have a better understanding of IDSs’ judgments. Furthermore, the different interpretations between different kinds of classifiers can also help security experts better design the structures of the IDSs. More importantly, this work is unique in the intrusion detection field, presenting the first use of the SHAP method to give explanations for IDSs.

Intrusion detection systems play an important role in preventing security threats and protecting networks from attacks. However, with the emergence of unknown attacks and imbalanced samples, traditional machine learning methods suffer from lower detection rates and higher false positive rates. We propose a novel intrusion detection model that combines an improved conditional variational AutoEncoder (ICVAE) with a deep neural network (DNN), namely ICVAE-DNN. ICVAE is used to learn and explore potential sparse representations between network data features and classes. The trained ICVAE decoder generates new attack samples according to the specified intrusion categories to balance the training data and increase the diversity of training samples, thereby improving the detection rate of the imbalanced attacks. The trained ICVAE encoder is not only used to automatically reduce data dimension, but also to initialize the weight of DNN hidden layers, so that DNN can easily achieve global optimization through back propagation and fine tuning. The NSL-KDD and UNSW-NB15 datasets are used to evaluate the performance of the ICVAE-DNN. The ICVAE-DNN is superior to the three well-known oversampling methods in data augmentation. Moreover, the ICVAE-DNN outperforms six well-known models in detection performance, and is more effective in detecting minority attacks and unknown attacks. In addition, the ICVAE-DNN also shows better overall accuracy, detection rate and false positive rate than the nine state-of-the-art intrusion detection methods.

To explore the advantages of adversarial learning and deep learning, we propose a novel network intrusion detection model called SAVAER-DNN, which can not only detect known and unknown attacks but also improve the detection rate of low-frequent attacks. SAVAER is a supervised variational auto-encoder with regularization, which uses WGAN-GP instead of the vanilla GAN to learn the latent distribution of the original data. SAVAER’s decoder is used to synthesize samples of low-frequent and unknown attacks, thereby increasing the diversity of training samples and balancing the training data set. SAVAER’s encoder is used to initialize the weights of the hidden layers of the DNN and explore high-level feature representations of the original samples. The benchmark NSL-KDD (KDDTest+), NSL-KDD (KDDTest-21) and UNSW-NB15 datasets are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed model. The experimental results show that the proposed SAVAER-DNN is more suitable for data augmentation than the other three well-known data oversampling methods. Moreover, the proposed SAVAER-DNN outperforms eight well-known classification models in detection performance and is more effective in detecting low-frequent and unknown attacks. Furthermore, compared with other state-of-the-art intrusion detection models reported in the IDS literature, the proposed SAVAER-DNN offers better performance in terms of overall accuracy, detection rate, F1 score, and false positive rate.

Machine learning plays an important role in building intrusion detection systems. However, with the increase of data capacity and data dimension, the ability of shallow machine learning is becoming more limited. In this paper, we propose a fuzzy aggregation approach using the modified density peak clustering algorithm (MDPCA) and deep belief networks (DBNs). To reduce the size of the training set and the imbalance of the samples, MDPCA is used to divide the training set into several subsets with similar sets of attributes. Each subset is used to train its own sub-DBNs classifier. These sub-DBN classifiers can learn and explore high-level abstract features, automatically reduce data dimensions, and perform classification well. According to the nearest neighbor criterion, the fuzzy membership weights of each test sample in each sub-DBNs classifier are calculated. The output of all sub-DBNs classifiers is aggregated based on fuzzy membership weights. Experimental results on the NSL-KDD and UNSW-NB15 datasets show that our proposed model has higher overall accuracy, recall, precision and F1-score than other well-known classification methods. Furthermore, the proposed model achieves better performance in terms of accuracy, detection rate and false positive rate compared to the state-of-the-art intrusion detection methods.

Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) is a significant component of intelligent transportation system, which facilitates vehicles to share sensitive information and corporate with others. However, due to its unique characteristics, such as openness, dynamic topology and high mobility, VANET suffers from various attacks. This paper proposes an anti-attack trust management scheme in VANET called AATMS to evaluate the trustworthiness of vehicles. With the help of AATMS, vehicles in VANET can avoid malicious vehicles and cooperate with trusted vehicles. The idea of AATMS is mainly inspired by TrustRank algorithm, which is used to combat web spams. In this paper, we calculate local trust and global trust, which indicate the local and global trust relationships among vehicles. First, Bayesian inference is adopted to calculate local trust of vehicles based on historical interactions. Then we select a small set of seed vehicles according to local trust and some social factors. Once we identify the reputable seed vehicles, we use the local trust link structure of vehicles to evaluate the global trust of all vehicles. The simulation results show that AATMS can efficiently identify trustworthy and untrustworthy vehicles in VANET even under malicious attacks.

As a core component of the network, web applications have become one of the preferred targets for attackers because the static configuration of web applications simplifies the exploitation of vulnerabilities by attackers. Although the moving target defense (MTD) has been proposed to increase the attack difficulty for the attackers, there is no solo approach can cope with different attacks; in addition, it is impossible to implement all these approaches simultaneously due to the resource limitation. Thus, the selection of an optimal defense strategy based on MTD has become the focus of research. In general, the confrontation of two players in the security domain is viewed as a stochastic game, and the reward matrices are known to both players. However, in a real security confrontation, this scenario represents an incomplete information game. Each player can only observe the actions performed by the opponent, and the observed actions are not completely accurate. To accurately describe the attacker’s reward function to reach the Nash equilibrium, this work simulated and updated the strategy selection distribution of the attacker by observing and investigating the strategy selection history of the attacker. Next, the possible rewards of the attacker in each confrontation via the observation matrix were corrected. On this basis, the Nash-Q learning algorithm with reward quantification was proposed to select the optimal strategy. Moreover, the performances of the Minimax-Q learning algorithm and Naive-Q learning algorithm were compared and analyzed in the MTD environment. Finally, the experimental results showed that the strategy selection algorithm can enable defenders to select a more reasonable defensive strategy and achieve the maximum possible reward.