Re: Announcement: Alert Verification for Snort

[Michael Stone <mstone () mathom us>]

On Thu, Oct 23, 2003 at 04:03:20PM -0700, Christopher Kruegel wrote:
> From a theoretical point of view, I think that Marty is right and his 
> classification is correct. In fact, we had a discussion about whether 
> 'alert verification' was the correct term to use. We then concluded 
> that most people don't care why they spent time looking at an alert 
> that doesn't matter to them and that they refer to such alerts in 
> general as false positives. That's why we used the terminology that we 
> did.

What people are looking for in an IDS is the detection of an intrusion.
With that in mind, a simple definition is, "if the system alerts on
something that's not an intrusion it's a false positive". To base the
definition on the behavior of signature matching engines would allow the
limitations of the technology to obscure the primary objective of that
technology.

Mike Stone

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