AI-Powered Multimodel Detection System for Cybersecurity Attacks: Design, Implementation, and Evaluation

Abstract

As cyber threats have become increasingly complex, so too has the need for advanced detection methods to be able to analyze different types of data. Historically, traditional intrusion detection systems (IDS), have relied on analyzing one form of data, either a statistical analysis of network traffic or an alert log written in text format. These limitations restrict the capability of IDSs to detect the many complexities associated with modern attacks. Therefore, this dissertation proposes an AI powered, multimodel detection system that utilizes a combination of both structured network data, and unstructured alert text, to improve the performance of intrusion detection systems. The methodologies include preprocessing and feature extraction on the CICIDS2017 dataset, machine learning algorithms for the analysis of structured data and Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms for the analysis of text data. The multimodel fusion method used late fusion where the predictions from each modality are combined to produce a single prediction. In addition, several classification algorithms were trained and tested including Random Forest, Logistic Regression, and Text Classification. Results showed that the multimodel system significantly outperformed the single-modality systems based on the evaluation metrics of Accuracy, Precision, Recall, and F1-Score. Furthermore, the multimodel fusion strategy enhanced the context of the detection by reducing false positive detections; this addresses a major challenge that is commonly experienced by researchers in the field of Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS). Therefore, this dissertation provides a practical, scalable, multimodel AI-based framework for detecting cybersecurity threats and demonstrates the effectiveness of using a combination of structured and unstructured data sources, along with providing direction for further advancements in Intelligent Intrusion Detection Systems.