A hybrid framework for enhanced intrusion detection in cloud environments leveraging autoencoder

Abstract

In today’s world, the significance of network security and cloud environments has grown. The rising demand for data transmission, along with the versatility of cloud-based solutions and widespread availability of global resources, are key drivers of this growth. In response to rapidly evolving threats and malicious attacks, developing a robust intrusion detection system (IDS) is essential. This study addresses the imbalanced data and utilizes an unsupervised learning approach to protect network data. The suggested hybrid framework employs the CIC-IDS2017 dataset, integrating methods for handling imbalanced data with unsupervised learning to enhance security. Following preprocessing, principal component analysis (PCA) reduces the dimensionality from eighty features to twenty-three features. The extracted features are input into density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN), a clustering algorithm. particle swarm optimization (PSO) optimizes DBSCAN, grouping similar traffic and enhancing classification. To address the imbalances in the learning process, the autoencoder (AE) algorithm demonstrates unsupervised learning. The data from the cluster is input into the AE, a deep learning algorithm, which classifies traffic as normal or an attack. The proposed approach (PCA+DBSCAN+AE) attains remarkable intrusion detection accuracy exceeding 98%, and outperforms five contemporary methodologies.