We apologize, this dataset is no longer available.
ISCX NSL-KDD is a data set suggested to solve some of the inherent problems of the KDD'99 data set which are mentioned in [1]. Although, this new version of the KDD data set still suffers from some of the problems discussed by McHugh and may not be a perfect representative of existing real networks, because of the lack of public data sets for network-based IDSs, we believe it still can be applied as an effective benchmark data set to help researchers compare different intrusion detection methods.
Furthermore, the number of records in the NSL-KDD train and test sets are reasonable. This advantage makes it affordable to run the experiments on the complete set without the need to randomly select a small portion. Consequently, evaluation results of different research work will be consistent and comparable.
Data files
The ISCX NSL-KDD data set has the following advantages over the original KDD data set:
One of the most important deficiencies in the KDD data set is the huge number of redundant records, which causes the learning algorithms to be biased towards the frequent records, and thus prevent them from learning unfrequent records which are usually more harmful to networks such as U2R and R2L attacks. In addition, the existence of these repeated records in the test set will cause the evaluation results to be biased by the methods which have better detection rates on the frequent records.
In addition, we analyzed the difficulty level of the records in KDD data set. Surprisingly, about 98% of the records in the train set and 86% of the records in the test set were correctly classified with all the 21 learners.
In order to perform our experiments, we randomly created three smaller subsets of the KDD train set each of which included fifty thousand records of information. Each of the learners where trained over the created train sets. We then employed the 21 learned machines (7 learners, each trained 3 times) to label the records of the entire KDD train and test sets, which provides us with 21 predicated labels for each record. Further, we annotated each record of the data set with a #successfulPrediction value, which was initialized to zero. Now, since the KDD data set provides the correct label for each record, we compared the predicated label of each record given by a specific learner with the actual label, where we incremented #successfulPrediction by one if a match was found. Through this process, we calculated the number of learners that were able to correctly label that given record. The highest value for #successfulPrediction is 21, which conveys the fact that all learners were able to correctly predict the label of that record.
Original records | Distinct records | Reduction rate
Original records | Distinct records | Reduction rate
You may redistribute, republish, and mirror the ISCX NSL-KDD dataset in any form. However, any use or redistribution of the data must include a citation to the NSL-KDD dataset and the paper referenced below.
References: [1] M. Tavallaee, E. Bagheri, W. Lu, and A. Ghorbani, “A Detailed Analysis of the KDD CUP 99 Data Set,” Submitted to Second IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence for Security and Defense Applications (CISDA), 2009.
