Affiliations 

  • 1 Information Assurance and Security Research Group, Faculty of Computing, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, UTM, Johor Bahru, Johor, Malaysia
  • 2 Faculty of Mathematical Sciences, University of Khartoum, Khartoum, Sudan
PLoS One, 2016;11(11):e0166017.
PMID: 27893821 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0166017

Abstract

Grouping and clustering alerts for intrusion detection based on the similarity of features is referred to as structurally base alert correlation and can discover a list of attack steps. Previous researchers selected different features and data sources manually based on their knowledge and experience, which lead to the less accurate identification of attack steps and inconsistent performance of clustering accuracy. Furthermore, the existing alert correlation systems deal with a huge amount of data that contains null values, incomplete information, and irrelevant features causing the analysis of the alerts to be tedious, time-consuming and error-prone. Therefore, this paper focuses on selecting accurate and significant features of alerts that are appropriate to represent the attack steps, thus, enhancing the structural-based alert correlation model. A two-tier feature selection method is proposed to obtain the significant features. The first tier aims at ranking the subset of features based on high information gain entropy in decreasing order. The‏ second tier extends additional features with a better discriminative ability than the initially ranked features. Performance analysis results show the significance of the selected features in terms of the clustering accuracy using 2000 DARPA intrusion detection scenario-specific dataset.

* Title and MeSH Headings from MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.