Improving Generalization of ML-Based IDS With Lifecycle-Based Dataset, Auto-Learning Features, and Deep Learning

During the past 10 years, researchers have extensively explored the use of machine learning (ML) in enhancing network intrusion detection systems (IDS). While many studies focused on improving accuracy of ML-based IDS, true effectiveness lies in robust generalization: the ability to classify unseen data accurately. Many existing models train and test on the same dataset, failing to represent the real unseen scenarios. Others who train and test using different datasets often struggle to generalize effectively. This study emphasizes the improvement of generalization through a novel composite approach involving the use of a lifecycle-based dataset (characterizing the attack as sequences of techniques), automatic feature learning (auto-learning), and a CNN-based deep learning model. The established model is tested on five public datasets to assess its generalization performance. The proposed approach demonstrates outstanding generalization performance, achieving an average F1 score of 0.85 and a recall of 0.94. This significantly outperforms the 0.56 and 0.42 averages recall achieved by attack-based datasets using CIC-IDS-2017 and CIC-IDS-2018 as training data, respectively. Furthermore, auto-learning features boost the F1 score by 0.2 compared to traditional statistical features. Overall, the efforts have resulted in significant advancements in model generalization, offering a more robust strategy for addressing intrusion detection challenges.