An immunity-based anomaly detection system with sensor agents

• Published in: Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) Vol. 9; no. 11; pp. 9175 - 9195
• Main Authors: Okamoto, Takeshi, Ishida, Yoshiteru
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland MDPI AG 01-11-2009; Molecular Diversity Preservation International (MDPI)
• Subjects: Accuracy; anomaly detection; False alarms; hidden Markov model; Immune system; immunity-based system; intrusion detection; Multiuser systems; receiver operating characteristics; sensor agent; Sensors; User behavior; Japan; sensor agent; anomaly detection; intrusion detection; immunity-based system; hidden Markov model; receiver operating characteristics
• ISSN: 1424-8220; 1424-8220
• DOI: 10.3390/s91109175

This paper proposes an immunity-based anomaly detection system with sensor agents based on the specificity and diversity of the immune system. Each agent is specialized to react to the behavior of a specific user. Multiple diverse agents decide whether the behavior is normal or abnormal. Conventional systems have used only a single sensor to detect anomalies, while the immunity-based system makes use of multiple sensors, which leads to improvements in detection accuracy. In addition, we propose an evaluation framework for the anomaly detection system, which is capable of evaluating the differences in detection accuracy between internal and external anomalies. This paper focuses on anomaly detection in user's command sequences on UNIX-like systems. In experiments, the immunity-based system outperformed some of the best conventional systems.