Machine Learning-Based Cyber Defense for Cloud Infrastructure: An Adaptive Deep Q-Network Architecture for Intelligent Intrusion Detection and Automated Threat Mitigation
This study addresses the challenge of complex and evolving cyberattacks in cloud environments by proposing an adaptive dynamic defense framework based on reinforcement learning. The work introduces, for the first time, a Deep Q-Network (DQN) into cloud security to establish an end-to-end intelligent intrusion detection and automated response loop. Leveraging feature engineering and data preprocessing, the model is trained on the CICIDS2017 dataset and validated on UNSW-NB15. Experimental results demonstrate that the system achieves 99.72% accuracy, a 99.66% F1-score, and a 0.999 ROC-AUC under previously unseen and evolving attacks, with a false positive rate of only 0.31%, an average detection latency of 15 ms, and an attack mitigation rate of 99.54%, thereby significantly enhancing real-time performance and generalization capability.