Adaptive Intrusion Detection: A Data Mining Approach

In this paper we describe a data mining framework for constructing intrusion detection models. The first key idea is to mine system audit data for consistent and useful patterns of program and user behavior. The other is to use the set of relevant system features presented in the patterns to compute inductively learned classifiers that can recognize anomalies and known intrusions. In order for the classifiers to be effective intrusion detection models, we need to have sufficient audit data for training and also select a set of predictive system features. We propose to use the association rules and frequent episodes computed from audit data as the basis for guiding the audit data gathering and feature selection processes. We modify these two basic algorithms to use axis attribute(s) and reference attribute(s) as forms of item constraints to compute only the relevant patterns. In addition, we use an iterative level-wise approximate mining procedure to uncover the low frequency but important patterns. We use meta-learning as a mechanism to make intrusion detection models more effective and adaptive. We report our extensive experiments in using our framework on real-world audit data.