Enhancing Intrusion Detection Systems in Cloud Computing Environments: A Hybrid Machine Learning Approach

Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) are essential for maintaining the security of cloud computing environments, which are increasingly targeted by sophisticated cyber-attacks. This paper presents a novel hybrid approach for intrusion detection in cloud environments, combining Random Forest for feature selection, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks for temporal pattern recognition, and Transformer networks for contextual learning. Evaluated on CICIDS2017 and CSE-CIC-IDS2018 datasets, the proposed approach achieved weighted F1-scores of 97% and 99% respectively, significantly outperforming baseline models. The hybrid model improved accuracy from 95.1% to 98.0% and F1-score from 94.2% to 97.0% compared to LSTM-only approaches. While excelling at detecting common attack patterns such as Distributed Denial of Services (DDoS), challenges remain in identifying rare threats including SQL Injection. This research contributes to cloud security advancement by demonstrating the effectiveness of hybrid machine learning architectures in addressing the unique challenges of intrusion detection in distributed cloud infrastructures.