Nature Inspired Techniques and Applications in Intrusion Detection Systems: Recent Progress and Updated Perspective

Abstract

Nowadays, it has become a necessity for operational and reliable operation of networks due to our increased dependency over the network services. However, intruders are continuously attempting to break into the networks and disturbing the network services using a variety of attack vectors and technologies. This motivates us to develop the techniques that ensure operational and reliable network, even in changing scenarios. Recently, most of the researchers have focused on the employment of techniques inspired by a natural phenomenon to detect the intrusions effectively. Nature-Inspired Techniques (NITs) have the ability to adapt to a constantly changing environment. Thus, they help to provide in-built resiliency to failures and damages, collaborative, survivable, self-organizing and self-healing capabilities to IDSs. The paper presents an analysis of NITs, and their classification based on the source of their inspiration. A comprehensive review of various NITs employed in intrusion detection is presented. Analysis of prominent research indicates that NITs based IDSs offers high detection rate and low false positive rate in comparison to the conventional IDSs. The NITs enables more flexibility in IDSs because of their employability into hybrid IDSs leading to detection on the basis of anomalies as well as signatures, leading in improving detection results of known and unknown attacks. The paper attempts to identify NITs’ advantages, disadvantages and significant challenges to the successful implementation of NITs in the intrusion detection area. The main intention of this paper is to explore and present a comprehensive review of the application of NITs in intrusion detection, covering a variety of NITs, study of the techniques and architectures used and further the contribution of NITs in the field of intrusion detection. Finally, the paper ends with the conclusion and future aspects.