Abstract
The need for building high-speed NIDS that can reliably generate alerts as intrusions occur and have the intrinsic ability to scale as network infrastructure and attack sophistication evolves has been discussed in this chapter. The key design principles are analyzed and it has been argued that network intrusion-detection functions should be carried out by distributed and collaborative NNIDS at the end hosts. It is shown that an NNIDS running on the network interface instead of the host operating system can provide increased protection, reduced vulnerability to circumvention, and much lower overhead. The chapter also describes the experience in implementing a prototype NNIDS, based on Snort, an Intel IXP 1200, and a Xilinx Virtex-1000 FPGA. These experiments help to identify the performance bottlenecks and give insights on how to improve the design. System stress tests shows that the embedded NNIDS can handle high-speed traffic without packet drops and achieve the same performance as the Snort software running on a dedicated high-end computer system. Ongoing work includes optimizing the performance of NNIDS, developing strategies for sustainable operation of the NNIDS under attacks through adaptation and active countermeasures, studying algorithms for distributed and collaborative intrusion detection, and further developing the analytical models for buffer and processor allocation. Also tested were FPGA pattern-matching designs that approach 10 Gbps throughput with the entire Snort ruleset using a Xilinx Virtex2 device. A better understanding of the design principles and implementation techniques for building high-speed has been provided, along with reliable, and scalable network intrusion detection systems.
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