Using Rule-Based Activity Descriptions to Evaluate Intrusion-Detection Systems

After more than a decade of development, there are now many commercial and non-commercial intrusion-detection systems (IDSes) available. However, they tend to generate false alarms at high rates while overlooking real threats. The results described in this paper have been obtained in the context of work that aims to identify means for supporting the analysis, evaluation, and design of large-scale intrusion-detection architectures. We propose a practical method for evaluating IDSes and identifying their strengths and weaknesses. Our approach shall allow us to evaluate IDSes for their capabilities, unlike existing approaches that evaluate their implementation. It is furthermore shown how the obtained knowledge can be used to analyze and evaluate an IDS.