Castles Built on Sand: Observations from Classifying Academic Cybersecurity Datasets with Minimalist Methods

Laurens D’hooge, Miel Verkerken, Tim Wauters, Filip De Turck, Bruno Volckaert

2023

Abstract

Machine learning (ML) has been a staple of academic research into pattern recognition in many fields, including cybersecurity. The momentum of ML continues to speed up alongside the advances in hardware capabilities and the methods they unlock, primarily (deep) neural networks. However, this article aims to demonstrate that the non-judicious use of ML in two prominent domains of data-based cybersecurity consistently misleads researchers into believing that their proposed methods constitute actual improvements. Armed with 17 state-of-the-art datasets in traffic and malware classification and the simplest possible machine learning model this article will show that the lack of variability in most of these datasets immediately leads to excellent models, even if that model is only one comparison per feature.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

D’hooge L., Verkerken M., Wauters T., De Turck F. and Volckaert B. (2023). Castles Built on Sand: Observations from Classifying Academic Cybersecurity Datasets with Minimalist Methods. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Internet of Things, Big Data and Security - Volume 1: IoTBDS, ISBN 978-989-758-643-9, SciTePress, pages 61-72. DOI: 10.5220/0011853300003482

in Bibtex Style

@conference{iotbds23,
author={Laurens D’hooge and Miel Verkerken and Tim Wauters and Filip De Turck and Bruno Volckaert},
title={Castles Built on Sand: Observations from Classifying Academic Cybersecurity Datasets with Minimalist Methods},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Internet of Things, Big Data and Security - Volume 1: IoTBDS,},
year={2023},
pages={61-72},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0011853300003482},
isbn={978-989-758-643-9},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Internet of Things, Big Data and Security - Volume 1: IoTBDS,
TI - Castles Built on Sand: Observations from Classifying Academic Cybersecurity Datasets with Minimalist Methods
SN - 978-989-758-643-9
AU - D’hooge L.
AU - Verkerken M.
AU - Wauters T.
AU - De Turck F.
AU - Volckaert B.
PY - 2023
SP - 61
EP - 72
DO - 10.5220/0011853300003482
PB - SciTePress