Digital devices and services are crucial to simplify our business and personal lives. However, several possible threats and suspicious behaviour increase along with the connectivity between different services. To avail of the different services, an efficient detection process of attacks is required. An intrusion Detection System (IDS) is a device or software application that helps in monitoring a network or system for any kind of suspicious activity or violation of policies. Any intrusion activity or violation can be controlled by using advanced integrated security solutions.
Over the decade there has been an astonishing growth in the use of web-based applications. E-commerce, online blog writing, E-banking, and all other social media websites are transmitting information and delivering online services through a common platform. There is no doubt that we are getting a great digital experience through these web applications. Along with this growth of online banking and e-commerce, the protection of these web applications from attackers is becoming a critical requirement that can’t be compromised.
Web applications give us amazing digital experiences, but only the secured applications can deliver the services safely. These applications deal with very sensitive data and operations which is the prime target of hackers.
How does an intrusion detection system function?
Intrusion Detection System uses two methods:
- Pattern in the signature database –
On an IPS-enabled device, the IPS signature database is stored and contains definitions of pre-set attacks from objects or suspected groups. These attack groups and objects are designed to detect any known attack patterns and irregularity of protocol within the network traffic. As a match condition in IPS policy rules, we can configure an attack from an object or group.
- Signature-based detection –
Signature-based detection uses a database of a set of known possible threats or attack patterns. A hacker by simply entering the IP address of the system to target can launch an SYN flood attack on a server, such attack then floods the target system with synchronizing (SYN) packets, but it will never complete the three-way Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) concord with the final acknowledge packet.
If the attack isn’t blocked out, it can exhaust resources on a system and sequentially cause it to crash. Signature-based detection has a constraint whereby a new malicious activity that is not in the database is neglected.
Supervised learning-based IDS
Supervised learning-based IDS techniques detect intrusions by using labelled training data. A supervised learning approach usually consists of two stages, namely testing and training. In the training stage, relevant classes and features are identified and then the algorithm learns from these data samples.
In supervised learning IDS, each record is a pair, containing a network or host data source and an associated output value, namely intrusion or normal.
Intrusion detection datasets
The evaluation datasets play an important role in the validation of any IDS approach, by allowing us to assess the proposed method’s efficiency in detecting intrusive behaviour.
The datasets used for network packet analysis in commercial products are not easily accessible due to privacy issues. However, there are a few datasets publicly available such as KDD, NSL-KDD, DARPA and ADFA-LD and they are generally used as benchmarks.
Types of IDS and how they help to protect your business:-
- Network intrusion detection system – A network intrusion detection system (NIDS) monitors network traffic and examines hosts to identify intruders using an independent platform.
- Perimeter intrusion detection system – Perimeter Intrusion Detection (PID) System – is a fence-mounted sensor that monitors and detects any form of intervention from the boundary. An intrusion attempt along the boundary, it will be detected by reflected waves.
- Host-based intrusion detection system – A host-based intrusion detection system is an intrusion detection system that is effective in analysing and monitoring the internals of a computing system as well as the network packets on its network interfaces, similar to the way a network-based intrusion detection software operates.
- A virtual machine-based intrusion detection system – A virtual machine (VM) based intrusion detection system (VIDS) is similar to one or a combination of any of the three IDSs above but deployed remotely via a virtual machine (VM). It’s the newest of the four IDS types and is currently still being improved.
Intended or Targeted Audience for Intrusion detection and prevention systems:-
- Government Organizations
- System Integrators
- Security Systems Suppliers
- Consulting Companies
- End-use Industries
- Software Application Vendors
- Hardware Vendors
- Technology Investors
Benefits of Intrusion detection solutions –
To detect the presence of an intruder attempting to break a boundary, we can use this technology in an external environment. In this era of digitalization, the boundary intrusion detection and prevention systems market has seen significant changes. Increasing awareness regarding the safety of residential areas and offering various benefits like detection of intruders crossing the restricted area. The increasing threat of cyber-attacks is one of the major driving factors for the perimeter intrusion detection and prevention systems market.
India perimeter intrusion detection & prevention systems market is expected to grow at 10.58% CAGR during the forecast period, 2017-2023. There has been a significant increase in terrorist activities in various regions of the country which has led to the higher deployment of perimeter intrusion detection & prevention systems. Thus, the Open Area perimeter intrusion detection & prevention systems in the region have become lucrative for the various manufacturing firms that provide perimeter intrusion detection & prevention system services.
Summary –:
Perimeter Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems (IDS/IPS) are used to safeguard the infrastructure and assets using advanced distributed sensing technology. The rapid increase in wired Internet speed and the constant growth in the number of attacks make network protection a challenge.
Intrusion detection systems (IDSs) play a crucial role in discovering suspicious activities and also in preventing their harmful impact. Existing signature-based IDSs have significant overheads in terms of execution time and memory usage mainly due to the pattern matching operation.
Therefore, there is a need to design an efficient system to reduce overhead. The service provider must be reliable and trustworthy like IGZY, otherwise, activities of outsiders or even employees might damage the property of the work-place.
