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ISSN: 2278 – 1323
International Journal of Advanced Research in Computer Engineering & Technology (IJARCET)
Volume 2, No 5, May 2013
www.ijarcet.org
1762
Abstract— Intrusion Detection (ID) is the most significant
component in Network Security System as it is responsible to
detect several types of attacks. The IDS commonly deals with a
large amount of data traffic, which involves irrelevant and
redundant features. The feature selection is one of the prominent
factors that influence the quality of IDS. We observe that
performing feature selection improves the attack detection
accuracy as well as the efficiency of the system. In our
experiments, we performed manual feature selection, using our
domain knowledge with analyzing the nature of the attack. We
compare the results of manual feature selection, automatic
feature selection and without feature selection for R2L attack.
Feature selection finding a subset of features to improve
classification accuracy. These features can be used to uniquely
identify a specific attack from all the connections. Experimental
result on the KDD cup 99 benchmark network intrusion
detection dataset demonstrates that the proposed approach
achieved high attack detection accuracy. Random Forest is
applied on reduced feature set and classification. It is highly
accurate classifier. Our proposed work as good as others and
time saving for the classification accuracy for R2L attacks.
Index Terms—feature selection, Intrusion Detection, KDD’99
Dataset, R2L.
I. INTRODUCTION
The growth of network intrusions on large enterprise
networks continues to increase. Thousands of hackers try to
probe and attack computer networks each day. These attacks
range from relatively benign ping sweeps to sophisticated
techniques exploiting security vulnerabilities [1].Intrusion
detection is the task of detecting and responding to this kind
of computer misuse, by detecting unauthorized access to a
computer network [2]. Intrusion detection systems are
“systems that collect information from a variety of system and
network sources, and then analyze the information for signs of
intrusion and misuse”. In other words, an IDS is a device,
typically a designated computer system, that monitors activity
to identify malicious or suspicious alerts. An IDS can be
compared with a spam filter, that raises an alarm if specific
things occur [3].
Before introducing intrusion detection system as a defense
tool, selecting necessary features is important.
Manuscript received May, 2013.
Mya Thidar Myo Win, Faculty of Information and Communication
Technology. University of Technology Yatanarpon Cyber City, Myanmar.
Kyaw Thet Khaing, Hardware Department, University of Computer
Studies Yangon, Myanmar.
It is because the success of the intrusion detection system
depends on the decision upon the set of features that the
system is going to use for detecting the attacker especially on
detecting the attack. Furthermore, extraneous features inside
the network traffic or audit data may be harder for the
intrusion detection system to detect the suspicious behavior of
attack.
Feature selection improves classification by searching for
the subset of features, which best classifies the training data.
The features under consideration depend on the type of IDS,
for example, a network based IDS will analyze network
related information such as packet destination IP address,
logged in time of a user, type of protocol, duration of
connection etc. Network intrusion detection systems operate
at the periphery of the networks and are, thus, overloaded with
large amount of network traffic, particularly in high speed
networks. [4]. A network intrusion detection system which
uses two features „logged in‟ and „number of file creations‟ to
classify network connections as either normal or attack.
When these features are analyzed in isolation they do not
provide significant information which can help in detecting
attacks. However, analyzing these features together can
provide meaningful information for classification. This is
because, a particular user may or may not have privileges to
create files in the system or the system may detect anomalous
activity by calculating deviation in the current profile and then
comparing it with the previously saved profile for that
particular user.
Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS) which can
analyzes connection level feature such as „service invoked at
the destination‟ in order to detect attacks. [5] When this
feature is analyzed in isolation, it is significant only when an
attacker requests for a service that is not available at the
destination and the system may then tag the connection as a
Probe attack. However, if this information is analyzed in
combination with other features such as „protocol type‟ and
„amount of data transferred between the source and the
destination‟; the audit data provides significant details which
help in improving classification. The relationships between
different features in the observed data, if considered by an
intrusion detection system during classification can
significantly decrease classification error, thereby improving
the attack detection accuracy.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2
presents an overview of related works. Section 3 gives the
features within the KDD data set and Section 4 gives
overview selected attacks in intrusion detection field. Section
5 discusses the detection rate of our system when applied to
the KDD 99 data.
Analyzing Knowledge Based Feature Selection
to Detect Remote to Local Attacks
Mya Thidar Myo Win, Kyaw Thet Khaing

ISSN: 2278 – 1323
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II. RELATED WORKS
Huang, Pei and Goodman [6], where the general problem
of GA optimized feature selection and extraction is addressed.
In their paper, Huang, et al. applies a GA to optimize the
feature weights of a KNN classifier and choose optimal subset
of features for a Bayesian classifier and a linear regression
classifier. Experiments in their paper show that the
performance of all these three classifiers with feature
weighing or selection by a GA is better than that of the same
classifiers without a GA. They conclude that performance
gain is completely dependent on what kind of classifier is used
over what type of data set.
Srinivas and Sung [7] presented the use of support vector
machine (SVM) to rank these extracted features, but this
method needs many iterations and is very time-consuming. In
the research of detection model generation, it is desirable that
the detection model be explainable and have high detection
rate, but the existing methods cannot achieve these two goals.
Chou et al. [8] presented an information theoretic feature
selection algorithm on both high and low dimensional feature
spaces with correlation analysis; thus verifying the
performance of the IDS using a combination of k-nearest
neighbor, fuzzy clustering and Damper-Shafer theory. A
rough set based parallel genetic algorithm hybrid model is
considered to address the important features in building an
IDS is considered by Mahmud et al. in [9].
An ensemble approach [10] helps to indirectly combine the
synergistic & complementary features of the different
learning paradigms without any complex hybridization. The
ensemble approach outperforms both SVMs MARs & ANNs.
SVMs outperform MARs & ANN in respect of Scalability,
training time, running time & prediction accuracy.
This paper [11] focuses on the dimensionality reduction
using feature selection. The Rough set support vector
machine (RSSVM) approach deploy Johnson‟s & genetic
algorithm of rough set theory to find the reduct sets & sent to
SVM to identify any type of new behavior either normal or
attack one.
The paper [12] use the feature selection algorithm of
random forests, because the algorithm can give estimates of
what features are important in the classification.
III. KDD‟99 DATASET AND PROPERTIES
Every record in the KDD 1999 data set presents 41 features
which can be used for detecting a variety of attacks such as the
Probe, DoS, R2L and U2R. Although the KDD'99 datasets
provide several attacks and several features not all of the
features contribute to an attack. Therefore it is important to
study the dataset and select relevance features that contribute
to a particular attack. This will make the IDS systems more
efficient by reducing the computational cost. Features are
grouped into four categories [13]:
 Basic Features: Basic features can be derived from packet
headers without inspecting the payload.
 Content Features: Domain knowledge is used to assess the
payload of the original TCP packets. This includes
features such as the number of failed login attempts;
 Time-based Traffic Features: These features are designed
to capture properties that mature over a 2 second
temporal window. One example of such a feature would
be the number of connections to the same host over the 2
second interval;
 Host-based Traffic Features: Utilize a historical window
estimated over the number of connections in this case 100
– instead of time. Host based features are therefore
designed to assess attacks, which span intervals longer
than 2 seconds.
However, using all the 41 features for detecting attacks
belonging to all these classes severely affects the performance
of the system and also generates superfluous rules, resulting in
fitting irregularities in the data which can misguide
classification. Hence, we performed feature selection to
effectively detect different classes of attacks. We now
describe the nature of the selected attack for selecting features
why some features were chosen over others.
IV. DESCRIPTION OF SELECTED ATTACKS AND THEIR
RELEVANT FEATURES
In this section, signatures of the selected attack will be
analyzed. The aim will be to extract relevant features from
signatures that must be selected to conclusively observe
the attack in a networked environment.
A. Ftp_write Attack
The Ftp-write attack is a Remote to Local User attack that
takes advantage of a common
anonymous ftp misconfiguration. The anonymous ftp root
directory and its subdirectories should not be owned by the ftp
account or be in the same group as the ftp account. If any of
these directories are owned by ftp or are in the same group as
the ftp account and are not write protected, an intruder will be
able to add files (such as an rhosts file) and eventually gain
local access to the system [14,15].
The ftp-write attack is a remote to local user attack that
takes advantage of a common anonymous ftp
misconfiguration. The ftp directory and its subdirectories
should not be owned by the ftp account or be in the same
group as the ftp account. If any of these directories are owned
by ftp or are in the same group as then ftp account and are not
write protected, an intruder will be able to add files (such as a
.rhosts file) and eventually gain local access to the system. We
could detect this attack easily due to the site-specific policy
that no file could be written in ftp directory.
B. Guesspassword Attack
This is similar to a dictionary attack, where the attacker
makes repeated attempts to login by guessing the password.
The behavioral specification had a specification which
limited the number of login attempts and flagged an attack,
when the number exceeded 3[1]. The guest attack is not
amenable to detection using a specification of normal
behavior because of the fact that the detection of the attack
requires the knowledge that attackers commonly try the user,
password pairs of guest/guest and guest/anonymous. The
attacks simulated by Lincoln Labs involve only two such
attempts, with the second attempt ending in a successful login
[15]. We therefore encoded this knowledge about attacker

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behavior in our specifications, and were then able to detect all
instances of the guest attack.
C. SNMPguess and SNMPget Attack
The Simple Network Management Protocol, SNMP, is a
commonly used service that provides network management
and monitoring capabilities. SNMP offers the capability to
poll networked devices and monitor data such as utilization
and errors for various systems on the host. SNMP is also
capable changing the configurations on the host, allowing the
remote management of the network device. The protocol uses
a community string for authentication from the SNMP client
to the SNMP agent on the managed device [16]. The SNMP
exploit takes advantage of these default community strings to
allow an attacker to gain information about a device using the
read community string "public", and the attacker can change a
systems configuration using the write community string
"private".
In the case of the snmpguess attack, the attacker sends
infinity of SNMP request with various community name and
the victim replies for each one, by sending an empty SNMP
message. Each couple of request reply is considered as a
SNMP connection independently from the others. To
differentiate the SNMP attack traffic from that normal we
used the two attributes “num_failed_login” and "logged_in"
which belong to the 41 attributes of the transformation
function. The first one, “num_failed_login”, count the
number of failed login in a session and the second one,
"logged_in", indicate that the user of the session in progress
presented the good password or not. For the
“num_failed_login” parameter that counts the number of
times an attacker gives a bad password. The value is
incremented when the attacker gives a bad community name
this is detected when the victim answers by an empty SNMP
message (empty SNMP response event) [17]. So it is
SNMPguess.
For the "logged_in" parameter the value is set at when the
attacker gives the good community name, i.e,when we detect
that the victim answers by a non-empty SNMP message
(SNMP response event). After having found the right
community name, the attacker will observe the community.
SNMP traffic generated by the attacker will then be regarded
as pertaining to the same SNMP session where the attacker
guessed the good password. SNMP records will have by
consequence the same value of the number of failure login
attribute. The snmpgetattack traffic is recognized as normal
because the attacker logs in as he was a non malicious user
since he has guessed the password.
After analyzed the proposed attack, we select 15 features
out of the total of 41 features by applying the union operation
on the feature sets of the four individual attack classes. The
features selected for detecting R2L attacks are presented in
Table I.
TABLE I. SELECTED FEATURES FOR PROPOSED ATTACKS
Feature
Number
Feature Name
1 Duration
2 Protocol
3 Service
4 Flag
5 Src_ bytes
6 dst _bytes
10 hot
11 num failed logins
12 Logged in
13 num compromised
17 num file creations
18 num shells
19 num access files
21 is host login
V. PERFORMANCE COMPARISON WITH PROPOSED FEATURES
We have used an open source machine learning framework
WEKA [Waikato Environment for Knowledge Analysis]
written at University of Waikato, New Zealand [18].The input
data for weka classifiers is represented in .ARFF [Attribute
Relation Function Format], consisting of the list of all
instances with the values for each instance separated by
commas. We perform our experiments with the benchmark
KDD 1999 intrusion data set [13]. The raw data from the
KDD 99 is first partitioned into four groups (input data set),
DoS attack set, Probe attack set, R2L attack set and U2R
attack set. For each attack set different connection record
feature set are selected as attributes. Classification is
performed using Random Forests (RF) algorithm. It is one of
the most successful ensemble methods that is fast, robust to
noise, and does not over fit. Random forests algorithm is more
accurate and efficient on large dataset like network traffic.
Figure I. Comparison with three experiences of R2L
attacks
We perform experiments, both, with and without feature
selection and automatic feature selection. Comparison from
Figure clearly suggests that a system implementing with
feature selection is more efficient and more accurate in
detecting attacks. For training our system to detect R2L
attacks, we select 22544 records from KDD dataset. To test
the model, we select all the R2L records. In Figure I show the
comparison with Classification rate of attack categories in
three experiences. We get experiments with manual Feature
Selection with the features shown in Figure I. In the second
experiment, we give the results for detecting R2L attacks
when we use all the 41 features. We use the same data as used
in the previous experiment. In automatic feature selection,
Weka tool [18] is used for feature reduction. CfsSubsetEval
with Best first approach is applied on the training dataset to
obtain the important features for the classification process.

ISSN: 2278 – 1323
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In Figure I show that manual feature selection is better
performance than without feature selection and automatic
feature selection except SNMPguess and SNMPget attack.
These attacks are misclassifying with normal while we can see
visualized classification error in weka tool. It showed a
classification rate of 73.33 % for Ftp_write attack and
99.96%. for Guesspassword attack. However the SNMPget
classification rate of 59.32% is low compared to the
classification rate of other category of attacks. It should be
noted that most of the machine learning algorithms offered an
acceptable level of classification rate for DoS and Probe
attack categories as they exhibit multiple connections over a
short period of time, while demonstrated poor performance
for the R2L and U2R categories as these attacks are
embedded in their data packets itself and do not form a
sequential pattern unlike DoS and Probe attacks. This makes
their detection by any classifier a difficult task. Inspite of this,
our approach gained good classification rate.
VI. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we compared manual feature selection with
automatic feature selection and without feature selection for
intrusion detection. First, feature relevance is performed by
analyzing the nature of selected attack. It analyses the
involvement of each feature to classification and a subset of
features are selected as relevant features. Then Random
Forest is applied on reduced feature set and classification. As
compared to the existing techniques, our proposed work as
good as others and time saving for the classification accuracy
for R2L attacks. As a future work, we would like to extent the
system to real time data capture and online detection of
intrusions.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
I would like to thank my supervisor and all of my teachers
for their helpful comments in improving our manuscript. We
would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their
thorough reviews, and constructive suggestions which
significantly enhance the presentation of the paper.
.
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