Advancing Wi-Fi Intrusion Detection Systems with Machine Learning Techniques for Enhanced Classification of Wireless Attacks

WiFi usability and scalability have contributed to an improvement in human living standards. However, this has also led to increased vulnerabilities and attack vectors within WiFi networks. Authentic users can face network failures and denial of service caused by attacks on wireless networks by some third-party. Wireless Intrusion Detection System (IDS) is needed to detect wireless attacks. Main of objective of wireless IDS is to monitor network traffic and classify if it is an attack or normal traffic. Modern anomaly based wireless intrusion detection systems use machine learning (ML) to learn from previous attacks in the dataset to learn patterns of the attack. Although this method is effective, but there is also downside to this approach. The time required to train and test these ML models are exceedingly high along with high computational costs. Big data is emerging technologies that is getting advanced day by day, due to which, network technology is increasing rapidly. For that reason, we need to discuss the issue, that is high computational costs. In our proposed solution, we used our custom oversampling technique BBOT (Balanced Boost Oversampling Technique) to rectify class imbalance, generating artificial samples for the classes, enhancing model performance. The results of the experiments show that the combination of feature selection, BBOT, and Decision Tree outperformed all other classifiers with reduced computational overhead, providing a practical and efficient solution for real-time intrusion detection in WiFi networks. When compared to XGBoost, the provided solution achieves a similar level of accuracy, but with significantly reduced training time.