Sequential Binary Classification for Intrusion Detection in Software Defined Networks

Software-Defined Networks (SDN) are the standard architecture for network deployment. Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) are a pivotal part of this technology as networks become more vulnerable to new and sophisticated attacks. Machine Learning (ML)-based IDS are increasingly seen as the most effective approach to handle this issue. However, IDS datasets suffer from high class imbalance, which impacts the performance of standard ML models. We propose Sequential Binary Classification (SBC) - an algorithm for multi-class classification to address this issue. SBC is a hierarchical cascade of base classifiers, each of which can be modelled on any general binary classifier. Extensive experiments are reported on benchmark datasets that evaluate the performance of SBC under different scenarios.