An efficient method for network security situation assessment

Network security situational assessment, the core task of network security situational awareness, can obtain security situation by comprehensively analyzing various factors that affect network status. Thus, network security situational assessment can provide accurate security state evaluation and security trend prediction for users. Although plenty of network security situational assessment methods have been proposed, there are still many problems to solve. First, because of high dimensionality of input data, computational complexity in model construction could be very high. Moreover, most of the existing schemes trade computational overhead for accuracy. Second, due to the lack of centralized standard, the weights of indicators are usually determined empirically or by subjective opinions of domain expert. To solve the above problems, we propose a novel network security situation assessment method based on stack autoencoding network and back propagation neural network. In stack autoencoding network and back propagation neural network, to reduce the data storage overhead and improve computational efficiency, we use stack autoencoding network to reduce the dimensions of the indicator data. And the low-dimensional data output by hidden layer of stack autoencoding network will be the input data of the error back propagation neural network. Then, the back propagation neural network algorithm is adopted to perform network security situation assessment. Finally, extensive experiments are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.