A Host-Based Intrusion Detection System Using Architectural Features to Improve Sophisticated Denial-of-Service Attack Detections

Application features like port numbers are used by Network-based Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDSs) to detect attacks coming from networks. System calls and the operating system related information are used by Host-based Intrusion Detection Systems (HIDSs) to detect intrusions toward a host. However, the relationship between hardware architecture events and Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks has not been well revealed. When increasingly sophisticated intrusions emerge, some attacks are able to bypass both the application and the operating system level feature monitors. Therefore, a more effective solution is required to enhance existing HIDSs. In this article, the authors identify the following hardware architecture features: Instruction Count, Cache Miss, Bus Traffic and integrate them into a HIDS framework based on a modern statistical Gradient Boosting Trees model. Through the integration of application, operating system and architecture level features, the proposed HIDS demonstrates a significant improvement of the detection rate in terms of sophisticated DoS intrusions.