Snort-Based Smart and Swift Intrusion Detection System

Objectives: In this paper, a smart Intrusion Detection System (IDS) has been proposed that detects network attacks in less time after monitoring incoming traffic thus maintaining better performance. Methods/Statistical Analysis: The features are extracted using back-propagation algorithm. Then, only these relevant features are trained with the help of multi-layer perceptron supervised neural network. The simulation is performed using MATLAB. Findings: The proposed system has been verified to have high accuracy rate, high sensitivity as well as a reduction in false positive rate. Besides, the intrusions have been classified into four categories as Denial-of-Service (DoS), User-to-root (U2R), Remote-to-Local (R2L) and Probe attacks; and the alerts are stored and shared via a central log. Thus, the unknown attacks detected by other Intrusion Detection Systems can be sensed by any IDS in the network thereby reducing computational cost as well as enhancing the overall detection rate. Applications/Improvements: The proposed system does not waste time by considering and analysing all the features but takes into consideration only relevant ones for the specific attack and supervised learning neural network is used for intrusion detection. By the application of Snort before backpropagation algorithm, the latter has only one function to perform – detection of unknown attacks. In this way, the time for attack detection is reduced.