Current state of Anomaly-based Intrusion Detection

[Göran Sandahl <goran () gsandahl net>]

Hi all.

I'm trying to get a picture of the current state of Anomaly-based 
network-monitoring-systems. In other words, Anomaly-based IDSs (are they 
really called ADSs?). 
After following the thread "Specification-based Anomaly Detection", I've 
realised that this question probably has allot of answers. However, I'd be 
very glad if you would take the time and write a couple of lines on what you 
think of the techniques that are used today, and whats needed for the future. 
I'm interested in "both sides of the story", so please tense your muscles and 
raise your voice ;)

As i figured, there are two different techniques that these systems work upon. 
Either, they are based on specifications (for example, hardcoded 200kb/s 
SMTP-traffic is normal) , or on statistic (Based on an "average". For 
example, 20 current TCP-sessions is normal). How does these techniques really 
work? How are they implemented today? How is this statistical information 
usually gathered? 

Also, signature-based IDSs are vulnerable to false alerts of different kinds 
(postitive, negative etc). I can imagine that anomaly-based techniques might 
suffer even worse to this. True?

And finally, while "reading through the lines" on some of the posts to the 
thread mentioned above, I got a feeling that this technique isn't yet ready 
for prime-time yet. Why is this? As I figure, the whole idea with network 
intrusion detection is pretty new, and none of the techniques seems to be 
without flaws.

Thanks in advance
Cheers
Göran

-- 
Göran Sandahl
mail:        goran () gsandahl net
web:         http://gsandahl.net

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