Machine learning for network application security: Empirical evaluation and optimization

Machine learning (ML) has demonstrated great potential to revolutionize the networking field. In this paper, we present a large-scale empirical study to evaluate the effectiveness of state-of-the-art ML algorithms for network application security. In our experiments, six classical ML algorithms and three neural network algorithms are evaluated over three networking datasets, KDDCup 99, NSL-KDD, and ADFA IDS 2017. Measurements are made between the non-optimized and optimized versions of ML algorithms. Furthermore, various training and testing ratios are experimented to assess each algorithm's optimal performance. The results revealed that optimizing ML algorithms could help achieve better performance in detecting networking attacks. In particular, the Decision Tree proved to be the most accurate and fastest algorithm in the classical ML while the Recurrent Neural Network achieved the best performance among neural network algorithms.