Performance and efficacy of Snort versus Suricata in intrusion detection: A benchmark analysis

This study conducts an empirical analysis to compare the performance of two prominent network intrusion detection systems (NIDS), Snort and Suricata. The analysis focuses on various performance metrics such as precision, recall, F1 score, specificity, log loss, and Cohen’s Kappa score. Additionally, it assesses the Receiver Operating Characteristic-Area Under Curve (ROC-AUC) score, which measures the ability of each system to distinguish between classes of network traffic accurately. Snort demonstrated superior performance with a precision of 0.91, recall of 0.92, and an F1 score of 0.91. It also showed a higher specificity of 0.91 and a ROC-AUC score of 91%. Suricata, while commendable, had a precision of 0.86, recall of 0.87, and an F1 score of 0.87, with a specificity of 0.85 and a ROC-AUC score of 86.4%. Snort also exhibited a lower log loss of 3.24 compared to Suricata’s 4.90, indicating more reliable predictive probabilities. Snort achieved a Cohen’s Kappa score of 0.82, suggesting substantial agreement, whereas Suricata scored 0.73. These results highlight Snort’s statistical advantage in detecting and classifying network intrusions in this comparison. However, the choice between Snort and Suricata may still depend on specific security needs, network architecture, and tolerance for false positives and negatives.