  Network intrusions have become a significant threat in recent years as a
result of the increased demand of computer networks for critical systems.
Intrusion detection system (IDS) has been widely deployed as a defense measure
for computer networks. Features extracted from network traffic can be used as
sign to detect anomalies. However with the huge amount of network traffic,
collected data contains irrelevant and redundant features that affect the
detection rate of the IDS, consumes high amount of system resources, and
slowdown the training and testing process of the IDS. In this paper, a new
feature selection model is proposed; this model can effectively select the most
relevant features for intrusion detection. Our goal is to build a lightweight
intrusion detection system by using a reduced features set. Deleting irrelevant
and redundant features helps to build a faster training and testing process, to
have less resource consumption as well as to maintain high detection rates. The
effectiveness and the feasibility of our feature selection model were verified
by several experiments on KDD intrusion detection dataset. The experimental
results strongly showed that our model is not only able to yield high detection
rates but also to speed up the detection process.
