BIDS: Bio-Inspired, Collaborative Intrusion Detection for Software Defined Networks

Abstract

With network attacks becoming more sophisticated and unpredictable, detecting their onset and mitigating their effects in an automated manner become increasingly challenging. Lightweight and agile detection mechanisms that are able to detect zero-day attacks are in great need. High true-negative rate and low false-positive rate are the most important indicators for a intrusion detection system. In this paper, we exploit the logically-centralised view of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) to increase true-negative rate and lower false-positive rate in a intrusion detection system based on the Artificial Immune System (AIS). We propose the use of an antibody fuser in the controller to merge and fuse the mature antibody sets trained in the individual switches and turn the real intrusion records each switch has seen into antibodies. Our results show that both the false-positive rate and true-negative rate experience significant improvement with the number of local antibody sets fused grows, consuming less cpu usage overhead. A peak improvement can reach over 80% when antibody sets from all switches are taken into consideration.