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JAIT 2023 Vol.14(6): 1345-1353
doi: 10.12720/jait.14.6.1345-1353

Leveraging the Training Data Partitioning to Improve Events Characterization in Intrusion Detection Systems

Roberto Saia *, Salvatore Carta, Gianni Fenu, and Livio Pompianu
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Cagliari, Cagliari, Italy;
Email: salvatore@unica.it (S.C.), fenu@unica.it (G.F.), pompianu.livio@unica.it (L.P.)
*Correspondence: roberto.saia@unica.it (R.S.)

Manuscript received April 24, 2023; revised May 30, 2023; accepted July 13, 2023; published December 7, 2023.

Abstract—The ever-increasing use of services based on computer networks, even in crucial areas unthinkable until a few years ago, has made the security of these networks a crucial element for anyone, also in consideration of the increasingly sophisticated techniques and strategies available to attackers. In this context, Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) play a primary role since they are responsible for analyzing and classifying each network activity as legitimate or illegitimate, allowing us to take the necessary countermeasures at the appropriate time. However, these systems are not infallible due to several reasons, the most important of which are the constant evolution of the attacks (e.g., zero-day attacks) and the problem that many of the attacks have behavior similar to those of legitimate activities, and therefore they are very hard to identify. This work relies on the hypothesis that the subdivision of the training data used for the IDS classification model definition into a certain number of partitions, in terms of events and features, can improve the characterization of the network events, improving the system performance. The non-overlapping data partitions train independent classification models, classifying the event according to a majority-voting rule. A series of experiments conducted on a benchmark real-world dataset support the initial hypothesis, showing a performance improvement with respect to a canonical training approach.
 
Keywords—intrusion detection, network security, training data, algorithm

Cite: Roberto Saia, Salvatore Carta, Gianni Fenu, and Livio Pompianu, "Leveraging the Training Data Partitioning to Improve Events Characterization in Intrusion Detection Systems," Journal of Advances in Information Technology, Vol. 14, No. 6, pp. 1345-1353, 2023.

Copyright © 2023 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided that the article is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.