Anomaly-based intrusion detection systems: The requirements, methods, measurements, and datasets

With the Internet's unprecedented growth and nations' reliance on computer networks, new cyber-attacks are created every day as means for achieving financial gain, imposing political agendas, and developing cyberwarfare arsenals. Network security is thus acquiring increasing attention among researchers, practitioners, network architects, policy makers, and others. To defend organizations' networks from existing, foreseen, and future threats, intrusion detection systems (IDSs) are becoming a must. Existing surveys on anomaly-based IDS (AIDS) focus on specific components such as detection mechanisms and lack many others. In contrast to existing surveys, this article covers the full scope needed by researchers and practitioners alike when studying AIDS. The scope ranges from the intrusion detection techniques to attacks forms and passing through the relevant attack features, most-used datasets, challenges, and potential solutions. This article provides an exhaustive review of IDSs and discusses their requirements and performance metrics in deep. It presents a taxonomy of IDSs based on four criteria: information source, detection strategy, detection mode, and architecture. Then, in-depth analysis and a comparison of network intrusion detection approaches based on anomaly detection techniques are given. The article also introduces a classification of computer network attacks, along with their different forms and the relevant network traffic features to detect them, as well as a summary of the popular datasets used by the researchers to evaluate the IDSs. Finally, the article highlights several research challenges and the possible solutions to deal with them.