CS406: Information Security

The previous two sections categorised IDS on the basis of the methods used to identify intrusions. IDS can also be classified based on the input data sources used to detect abnormal activities. In terms of data sources, there are generally two types of IDS technologies, namely Host-based IDS (HIDS) and Network-based IDS (NIDS). HIDS inspect data that originates from the host system and audit sources, such as operating system, window server logs, firewalls logs, application system audits, or database logs. HIDS can detect insider attacks that do not involve network traffic (Creech & Hu, 2014a).

NIDS monitors the network traffic that is extracted from a network through packet capture, NetFlow, and other network data sources. Network-based IDS can be used to monitor many computers that are joined to a network. NIDS is able to monitor the external malicious activities that could be initiated from an external threat at an earlier phase, before the threats spread to another computer system. On the other hand, NIDSs have limited ability to inspect all data in a high bandwidth network because of the volume of data passing through modern high-speed communication networks (Bhuyan et al., 2014). NIDS deployed at a number of positions within a particular network topology, together with HIDS and firewalls, can provide a concrete, resilient, and multi-tier protection against both external and insider attacks.

Table 4 shows a summary of comparisons between HIDS and NIDS.

Table 4 Comparison of IDS technology types based on their positioning within the computer system

Creech et al. proposed a HIDS methodology applying discontinuous system call patterns, with the aim to raise detection rates while decreasing false alarm rates (Creech, 2014). The main idea is to use a semantic structure to kernel level system calls to understand anomalous program behaviour.

As shown in Table 5 a number of AIDS systems have also been applied in Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS) and Host Intrusion Detection System (HIDS) to increase the detection performance with the use of machine learning, knowledge-based and statistical schemes. Table 5 also provides examples of current intrusion detection approaches, where types of attacks are presented in the detection capability field. Data source comprises system calls, application programme interfaces, log files, data packets obtained from well-known attacks. These data sources can be beneficial to classify intrusion behaviors from abnormal actions.

Table 5 Comparisons of IDS technology types, using examples from the literature. "P" indicates pre-defined attacks and "Z" indicates zero-day attacks