An anomaly-based intrusion detection system in presence of benign outliers with visualization capabilities

Abnormal network traffic analysis through Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) and visualization techniques has considerably become an important research topic to protect computer networks from intruders. It has been still challenging to design an accurate and a robust IDS with visualization capabilities to discover security threats due to the high volume of network traffic. This research work introduces and describes a novel anomaly-based intrusion detection system in presence of long-range independence data called benign outliers, using a neural projection architecture by a modified Self-Organizing Map (SOM) to not only detect attacks and anomalies accurately, but also provide visualized information and insights to end users. The proposed approach enables better analysis by merging the large amount of network traffic into an easy-to-understand 2D format and a simple user interaction. To show the performance and validate the proposed visualization-based IDS, it has been trained and tested over synthetic and real benchmarking datasets (NSL-KDD, UNSW-NB15, AAGM and VPN-nonVPN) that are widely applied in this domain. The results of the conducted experimental study confirm the advantages and effectiveness of the proposed approach. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.