String distances and intrusion detection : bridging the gap between formal languages and computer security

Bruschi, Danilo; Pighizzini, Giovanni

RAIRO - Theoretical Informatics and Applications - Informatique Théorique et Applications, Tome 40 (2006) no. 2, pp. 303-313.

In this paper we analyze some intrusion detection strategies proposed in the literature and we show that they represent the various facets of a well known formal languages problem: computing the distance between a string $x$ and a language $L$. In particular, the main differences among the various approaches adopted for building intrusion detection systems can be reduced to the characteristics of the language $L$ and to the notion of distance adopted. As a further contribution we will also show that from the computational point of view all these strategies are equivalent and they are amenable to efficient parallelization.

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