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String distances and intrusion detection:Bridging the gap between formal languages and computersecurity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 July 2006

Danilo Bruschi
Affiliation:
Dipartimento di Informatica e Comunicazione, Università degli Studi di Milano, via Comelico, 39, 20135 Milano, Italy; [email protected],[email protected]
Giovanni Pighizzini
Affiliation:
Dipartimento di Informatica e Comunicazione, Università degli Studi di Milano, via Comelico, 39, 20135 Milano, Italy; [email protected],[email protected]
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Abstract

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.

Keywords

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© EDP Sciences, 2006

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