A Transfer Learning with Deep Neural Network Approach for Network Intrusion Detection

Abstract

Traditional Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) encounter difficulties due to the exponential growth of network traffic data and modern attacks' requirements. This paper presents a novel network intrusion classification framework using transfer learning from the VGG-16 pre-trained model. The framework extracts feature leveraging pre-trained weights trained on the ImageNet dataset in the initial step, and finally, applies a deep neural network to the extracted features for intrusion classification. We applied the presented framework on NSL-KDD, a benchmark dataset for network intrusion, to evaluate the proposed framework's performance. We also implemented other pre-trained models such as VGG19, MobileNet, ResNet-50, and Inception V3 to evaluate and compare performance. This paper also displays both binary classification (normal vs. attack) and multi-class classification (classifying types of attacks) for network intrusion detection. The experimental results show that feature extraction using VGG-16 outperforms other pre-trained models producing better accuracy, precision, recall, and false alarm rates.