Automated testing of IDS rules

As technology becomes ubiquitous, new vulnerabilities are being discovered at a rapid rate. Security experts continuously find ways to detect attempts to exploit those vulnerabilities. The outcome is an extremely large and complex rule set used by Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) to detect and prevent the vulnerabilities. The rule sets have become so large that it seems infeasible to verify their precision or identify overlapping rules. This work proposes a methodology consisting of a set of tools that will make rule management easier.