Master of Science in Computing

thesisCurrent Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) in a typical enterprise or campus network are limited by having a number of static monitoring points and static IDS resources deployed. The monitoring points are typically deployed using hardware optical taps or span ports which are directly fed into the IDS. The IDS system is a compute resource requiring dedicated-server-grade hardware, and these are statically configured when installing the network for an enterprise or campus. We designed a framework for making a distributed elastic Intrusion Detection System (IDS) for a Software Defined Network (SDN) capable network, called Distributed Elastic Intrusion DeTECTion (DEIDtect). We combine the flexibility of SDN and the elastic resource usage of a cloud infrastructure with a DEIDtect orchestrating controller to achieve an elastic IDS framework. DEIDtect enables simple and more dynamic management of IDS systems. The flexibility of our approach also enables new IDS use cases and deployment strategies