Intrusion detection based on gray-level co-occurrence matrix and 2d dispersion entropy

The Intrusion Detection System (IDS) is an important tool to mitigate cybersecurity threats in an Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure. The function of the IDS is to detect an intrusion to an ICT system or network so that adequate countermeasures can be adopted. Desirable features of IDS are computing efficiency and high intrusion detection accuracy. This paper proposes a new anomaly detection algorithm for IDS, where a machine learning algorithm is applied to detect deviations from legitimate traffic, which may indicate an intrusion. To improve computing efficiency, a sliding window approach is applied where the analysis is applied on large sequences of network flows statistics. This paper proposes a novel approach based on the transformation of the network flows statistics to gray images on which Gray level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM) are applied together with an entropy measure recently proposed in literature: the 2D Dispersion Entropy. This approach is applied to the recently public IDS data set CIC-IDS2017. The results show that the proposed approach is competitive in comparison to other approaches proposed in literature on the same data set. The approach is applied to two attacks of the CIC-IDS2017 data set: DDoS and Port Scan achieving respectively an Error Rate of 0.0016 and 0.0048.