new intrusion detection system

[Devon H. O'Dell]

Tomas Pluskal wrote:
> 
> Hello to all,
> 
> I have implemented a new type of intrusion detection system for my 
> Master thesis. I would like to announce this information, in case anyone 
> would be interested in this research.
> 
> The IDS system is designed as a kernel module for FreeBSD 5.2. It is 
> inspired by the SpamAssassin program, which detects spam by applying a 
> set of tests to every email message and counting a sum of point score 
> generated by each test. My IDS system applies a set of tests to every 
> running process in the OS and counts its score generated by the tests. 
> Therefore, the purpose of the IDS is not to monitor the network traffic, 
> but rather to monitor the process activity.
> 
> The current system status is a "working prototype" - it is not ready for 
> production usage, but it may serve as a good base for an interesting 
> research.
> 
> If you are interested in this topic, please read the details here: 
> http://plusik.pohoda.cz/thesis/
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Tomas

Hello Tomas,

At a first glance of this email, I thought ``An IDS based upon 
SpamAssassin ideology? Intrusions differ too much from spam for this to 
be accurate!'' After reading your thesis, my ideas were changed.

This work is certainly very interesting, and I encourage you to continue 
its development. Certainly one thing that would be desirable that I did 
not see listed in the improvements section (and many other IDS systems, 
such as Bro) would be the ability to carry out some action (instead of 
pure reporting) based upon behavior; this would allow for IDS as well as 
IPS behavior.

I'm quite interested and impressed by the work you've done here. Do you 
have any plans of setting this up as a collaborative project? Can I help 
you by providing a place for you to do this?

At the moment, I'm not able to provide much help for implementing any of 
the features listed in your thesis (although I am interested in working 
on and with this software at some point in the not-too-far future :)), 
but please let me know if I can help by providing resources, as this is 
something that I can do with little effort and in little time.

Congratulations, and good luck with your study!

Kind Regards,

Devon H. O'Dell