Efficient Intrusion Detection Using Principal Component Analysis

Most current intrusion detection systems are signature based ones or machine learning based methods. Despite the number of machine learning algorithms applied to KDD 99 cup, none of them have introduced a pre-model to reduce the huge information quantity present in the different KDD 99 datasets. We introduce a method that applies to the different datasets before performing any of the different machine learning algorithms applied to KDD 99 intrusion detection cup. This method enables us to significantly reduce the information quantity in the different datasets without loss of information. Our method is based on Principal Component Analysis (PCA). It works by projecting data elements onto a feature space, which is actually a vector space Rd , that spans the significant variations among known data elements. We present two well known algorithms we deal with, decision trees and nearest neighbor, and we show the contribution of our approach to alleviate the decision process. We rely on some experiments we perform over network records from the KDD 99 dataset, first by a direct application of these two algorithms on the rough data, second after projection of the different datasets on the new feature space.