An Intrusion Detection System Based on a Simplified Residual Network

Residual networks (ResNets) are prone to over-fitting for low-dimensional and small-scale datasets. And the existing intrusion detection systems (IDSs) fail to provide better performance, especially for remote-to-local (R2L) and user-to-root (U2R) attacks. To overcome these problems, a simplified residual network (S-ResNet) is proposed in this paper, which consists of several cascaded, simplified residual blocks. Compared with the original residual block, the simplified residual block deletes a weight layer and two batch normalization (BN) layers, adds a pooling layer, and replaces the rectified linear unit (ReLU) function with the parametric rectified linear unit (PReLU) function. Based on the S-ResNet, a novel IDS was proposed in this paper, which includes a data preprocessing module, a random oversampling module, a S-Resnet layer, a full connection layer and a Softmax layer. The experimental results on the NSL-KDD dataset show that the IDS based on the S-ResNet has a higher accuracy, recall and F1-score than the equal scale ResNet-based IDS, especially for R2L and U2R attacks. And the former has faster convergence velocity than the latter. It proves that the S-ResNet reduces the complexity of the network and effectively prevents over-fitting; thus, it is more suitable for low-dimensional and small-scale datasets than ResNet. Furthermore, the experimental results on the NSL-KDD datasets also show that the IDS based on the S-ResNet achieves better performance in terms of accuracy and recall compared to the existing IDSs, especially for R2L and U2R attacks.