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Principled reasoning and practical applications of alert fusion in intrusion detection systems

Published: 18 March 2008 Publication History

Abstract

It is generally believed that by combining several diverse intrusion detectors (i.e., forming an IDS ensemble), we may achieve better performance. However, there has been very little work on analyzing the effectiveness of an IDS ensemble. In this paper, we study the following problem: how to make a good fusion decision on the alerts from multiple detectors in order to improve the final performance. We propose a decision-theoretic alert fusion technique based on the likelihood ratio test (LRT). We report our experience from empirical studies, and formally analyze its practical interpretation based on ROC curve analysis. Through theoretical reasoning and experiments using multiple IDSs on several data sets, we show that our technique is more flexible and also outperforms other existing fusion techniques such as AND, OR, majority voting, and weighted voting.

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        cover image ACM Conferences
        ASIACCS '08: Proceedings of the 2008 ACM symposium on Information, computer and communications security
        March 2008
        399 pages
        ISBN:9781595939791
        DOI:10.1145/1368310
        Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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        Published: 18 March 2008

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        Author Tags

        1. IDS ensemble
        2. ROC curve
        3. alert fusion
        4. intrusion detection
        5. likelihood ratio test

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        • (2022)RAPID: Real-Time Alert Investigation with Context-aware Prioritization for Efficient Threat DiscoveryProceedings of the 38th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference10.1145/3564625.3567997(827-840)Online publication date: 5-Dec-2022
        • (2022)Diversity-by-Design for Dependable and Secure Cyber-Physical Systems: A SurveyIEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management10.1109/TNSM.2021.309139119:1(706-728)Online publication date: Mar-2022
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