The deterministic Dendritic Cell Algorithm

The Dendritic Cell Algorithm is an immune-inspired algorithm originally based on the function of natural dendritic cells. The original instantiation of the algorithm is a highly stochastic algorithm. While the performance of the algorithm is good when applied to large real-time datasets, it is difficult to analyse due to the number of random-based elements. In this paper a deterministic version of the algorithm is proposed, implemented and tested using a port scan dataset to provide a controllable system. This version consists of a controllable amount of parameters, which are experimented with in this paper. In addition the effects are examined of the use of time windows and variation on the number of cells, both which are shown to influence the algorithm. Finally a novel metric for the assessment of the algorithms output is introduced and proves to be a more sensitive metric than the metric used with the original Dendritic Cell Algorithm.

Further exploration of the Dendritic Cell Algorithm: antigen multiplier and time windows

As an immune-inspired algorithm, the Dendritic Cell Algorithm (DCA), produces promising performance in the field of anomaly detection. This paper presents the application of the DCA to a standard data set, the KDD 99 data set. The results of different implementation versions of the DCA, including antigen multiplier and moving time windows, are reported. The real-valued Negative Selection Algorithm (NSA) using constant-sized detectors and the C4.5 decision tree algorithm are used, to conduct a baseline comparison. The results suggest that the DCA is applicable to KDD 99 data set, and the antigen multiplier and moving time windows have the same effect on the DCA for this particular data set. The real-valued NSA with contant-sized detectors is not applicable to the data set. And the C4.5 decision tree algorithm provides a benchmark of the classification performance for this data set.

Performance evaluation of DCA and SRC on a single bot detection

Malicious users try to compromise systems using new techniques. One of the recent techniques used by the attacker is to perform complex distributed attacks such as denial of service and to obtain sensitive data such as password information. These compromised machines are said to be infected with malicious software termed a “bot”. In this paper, we investigate the correlation of behavioural attributes such as keylogging and packet flooding behaviour to detect the existence of a single bot on a compromised machine by applying (1) Spearman’s rank correlation (SRC) algorithm and (2) the Dendritic Cell Algorithm (DCA). We also compare the output results generated from these two methods to the detection of a single bot. The results show that the DCA has a better performance in detecting malicious activities.