Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 July 2006
In this paper we analyze some intrusion detection strategiesproposed in the literature and we show that they represent thevarious facets of a well known formal languages problem: computingthe distance between a string x and a language L. Inparticular, the main differences among the various approachesadopted for building intrusion detection systems can be reduced tothe characteristics of the language L and to the notion ofdistance adopted. As a further contribution we will also show thatfrom the computational point of view all these strategies areequivalent and they are amenable to efficient parallelization.