A Survey of Signature Based & Statistical Based Intrusion Detection Techniques

This paper presents a comprehensive survey of some modern and most popular intrusion detection techniques. It is unrealistic to prevent security breaches completely using the existing security technologies. Detecting the presence of intruder is very crucial for maintaining the network security. It is found that most of the current intrusion detection systems (IDSs) are signature based systems. The signature based intrusion detection system are based on matching a signature with the network details. Provided with the signatures or patterns they can detect many or all known attack patterns but they are of little use for as yet unknown attacks. Rate of false positives is close to nil but these types of systems are poor at detecting new attacks or variation of known attacks or attacks that can be masked as normal behavior. The other type of IDS i.e. Statistical Based Intrusion detection System (SBIDS) can overcome many of the aforementioned limitations of signature based intrusion detection systems. The statistical based intrusion detection systems performs better than signature based intrusion detection system for novelty detection i.e. detection of new attack is very important for intrusion detection system. Researchers have implemented various classification algorithms for intrusion detection.