Development of a quality assurance prototype for intrusion detection systems

Abstract

Quality assurance is an essential activity for any business interacting with consumers. There are considerable number of projects going on to develop intrusion detection systems (IDSs). However, efforts to establish standards and practices to ensure the quality of such systems are comparatively less significant. The quality assurance activities for IDSs should ensure the conformance of explicitly stated functional and performance requirements as well as implicit characteristics that are expected from information security tools. This dissertation establishes guidelines to review, evaluate and possibly to develop an IDS. To establish guidelines, generic IDS and software requirements, software quality factors and design principles are used which are available in related literature and these requirements are presented both on developed generic IDS model and in Common Criteria Protection Profile format. First, the guidelines are developed, then they are implemented on a specific IDS product evaluation.