A Lone Wolf No More: Supporting Network Intrusion Detection with Real-Time Intelligence

For network intrusion detection systems it is becoming increasingly difficult to reliably report today’s complex attacks without having external context at hand. Unfortunately, however, today’s IDS cannot readily integrate intelligence, such as dynamic blacklists, into their operation. In this work, we introduce a fundamentally new capability into IDS processing that vastly broadens a system’s view beyond what is visible directly on the wire. We present a novel Input Framework that integrates external information in real-time into the IDS decision process, independent of specific types of data, sources, and desired analyses. We implement our design on top of an open-source IDS, and we report initial experiences from real-world deployment in a large-scale network environment. To ensure that our system meets operational constraints, we further evaluate its technical characteristics in terms of the intelligence volume it can handle under realistic workloads, and the latency with which real-time updates become available to the IDS analysis engine. The implementation is freely available as open-source software.