Open Access

ARTICLE

A Dual-Attention CNN-BiLSTM Model for Network Intrusion Detection

Zheng Zhang^1,2, Jie Hao², Liquan Chen^1,*, Tianhao Hou², Yanan Liu²

1 School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, 211199, China
2 School of Network Security, Jinling Institute of Technology, Nanjing, 211169, China

* Corresponding Author: Liquan Chen. Email:

Computers, Materials & Continua 2026, 86(1), 1-22. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2025.068372

Received 27 May 2025; Accepted 22 August 2025; Issue published 10 November 2025

Abstract

With the increasing severity of network security threats, Network Intrusion Detection (NID) has become a key technology to ensure network security. To address the problem of low detection rate of traditional intrusion detection models, this paper proposes a Dual-Attention model for NID, which combines Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) to design two modules: the FocusConV and the TempoNet module. The FocusConV module, which automatically adjusts and weights CNN extracted local features, focuses on local features that are more important for intrusion detection. The TempoNet module focuses on global information, identifies more important features in time steps or sequences, and filters and weights the information globally to further improve the accuracy and robustness of NID. Meanwhile, in order to solve the class imbalance problem in the dataset, the EQL v2 method is used to compute the class weights of each class and to use them in the loss computation, which optimizes the performance of the model on the class imbalance problem. Extensive experiments were conducted on the NSL-KDD, UNSW-NB15, and CIC-DDos2019 datasets, achieving average accuracy rates of 99.66%, 87.47%, and 99.39%, respectively, demonstrating excellent detection accuracy and robustness. The model also improves the detection performance of minority classes in the datasets. On the UNSW-NB15 dataset, the detection rates for Analysis, Exploits, and Shellcode attacks increased by 7%, 7%, and 10%, respectively, demonstrating the Dual-Attention CNN-BiLSTM model’s excellent performance in NID.

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