Adaptive blacklist-based packet filter with a statistic-based approach in network intrusion detection

Network intrusion detection systems (NIDS) are widely deployed in various network environments. Compared to an anomaly based NIDS, a signature-based NIDS is more popular in real-world applications, because of its relatively lower false alarm rate. However, the process of signature matching is a key limiting factor to impede the performance of a signature-based NIDS, in which the cost is at least linear to the size of an input string and the CPU occupancy rate can reach more than 80% in the worst case. In this paper, we develop an adaptive blacklist-based packet filter using a statistic-based approach aiming to improve the performance of a signature-based NIDS. The filter employs a blacklist technique to help filter out network packets based on IP confidence and the statistic-based approach allows the blacklist generation in an adaptive way, that is, the blacklist can be updated periodically. In the evaluation, we give a detailed analysis of how to select weight values in the statistic-based approach, and investigate the performance of the packet filter with a DARPA dataset, a real dataset and in a real network environment. Our evaluation results under various scenarios show that our proposed packet filter is encouraging and effective to reduce the burden of a signature-based NIDS without affecting network security. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.