Analysis of the 1999 DARPA/Lincoln Laboratory IDS evaluation data with NetADHICT

Abstract

The 1999 DARPA/Lincoln Laboratory IDS evaluation data has been widely used in the intrusion detection and networking community, even though it is known to have a number of artifacts. Here we show that many of these artifacts, including the lack of damaged or unusual background packets and uniform host distribution, can be easily extracted using NetADHICT, a tool we developed for understanding networks. In addition, using NetADHICT we were able to identify extreme temporal variation in the data, a characteristic that was not identified in past analyses. These results illustrate the utility of NetADHICT in characterizing network traces for experimental purposes.