A Proposed Heuristic Optimization Algorithm for Detecting Network Attacks

Abstract

Due to the exponential growth of E-Business and computing capabilities over the web for a pay-for-use groundwork, the risk factors regarding security issues also increase rapidly. As the usage increases, it becomes very difficult to identify malicious attacks since the attack patterns change. Therefore, host machines in the network must continually be monitored for intrusions since they are the final endpoint of any network. The purpose of this work is to introduce a generalized neural network model that has the ability to detect network intrusions. Two recent heuristic algorithms inspired by the behavior of natural phenomena, namely, the particle swarm optimization (PSO) and gravitational search (GSA) algorithms are introduced. These algorithms are combined together to train a feed forward neural network (FNN) for the purpose of utilizing the effectiveness of these algorithms to reduce the problems of getting stuck in local minima and the time-consuming convergence rate. Dimension reduction focuses on using information obtained from NSL-KDD Cup 99 data set for the selection of some features to discover the type of attacks. Detecting the network attacks and the performance of the proposed model are evaluated under different patterns of network data.