Abstract — The current research on privacy assurance in Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) by pseudonym generation and network accountability through revocation has not achieved the desired results

Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) are among the fastest growing technologies in computer security domain. These systems are designed to identify/ prevent any hostile intrusion into a network. Today, variety of open source and commercial IDS are available to match the users/ network requirements. It has been accepted that the open source intrusion detection systems enjoys more support over commercial systems on account of cost, flexible configuration, online support, cross platform implementation etc. Among open source IDS, Snort has secured a prominent place and has been considered as a de facto standard in the IDS market. Snort is the real time packet analyser and packet logger that perform packet payload inspection by using contents matching algorithms. The system has been considered as a good alternative to expensive and heavy duty Network Intrusion Detection systems (NIDS). This research work has focussed on analysing the performance of Snort under heavy traffic conditions. This has been done on a test bench specifically designed to replicate the current day network traffic. Snort has been evaluated on different operating systems (OS) platforms and hardware resources by subjecting it to different categories of input traffic. Attacks were also injected to determine the detection quality of the system under different conditions. Our results have identified a strong performance limitation of Snort; it was unable to withstand few hundred mega bits per second of network traffic. This has generated queries on the performance of Snort and opened a new debate on the efficacy of open source systems.