Prelude IDS: current state and development perspectives

Despite the existence of many high-quality open source network security tools, there are not many open source products that could be used for enterprise level intrusion detection systems (IDS). The Prelude IDS project aims to fill this gap by creating a free (GPL), robust, fast, and modular hybrid IDS, comparable with existing commercial solutions. Prelude’s architecture allows building of centralized, multi-tier systems spanning many hosts and networks and combining both host and network based detection techniques, as well as easy integration of third-party applications as detection modules. This paper focuses on the current stable version (0.8), presenting its architecture, practical deployment considerations as well as overview of current development efforts.