Comparative Evaluation of AI-Based Techniques for Zero-Day Attacks Detection

Many intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDPS) have been introduced to identify suspicious activities. However, since attackers are exploiting new vulnerabilities in systems and are employing more sophisticated advanced cyber-attacks, these zero-day attacks remain hidden from IDPS in most cases. These features have incentivized many researchers to propose different artificial intelligence-based techniques to prevent, detect, and respond to such advanced attacks. This has also created a new requirement for a comprehensive comparison of the existing schemes in several aspects ; after a thorough study we found that there currently exists no detailed comparative analysis of artificial intelligence-based techniques published in the last five years. Therefore, there is a need for this kind of work to be published, as there are many comparative analyses in other fields of cyber security that are available for readers to review.In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of the latest and most recent literature, which introduces well-known machine learning and deep learning algorithms and the challenges they face in detecting zero-day attacks. Following these qualitative analyses, we present the comparative evaluation results regarding the highest accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score compared to different datasets.