The evolving necessity of the Internet increases the demand on the bandwidth.
Therefore, this demand opens the doors for the hackers’ community to develop new
methods and techniques to gain control over networking systems. Hence, the intrusion
detection systems (IDS) are insufficient to prevent/detect unauthorized access the
network. Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS) is one example that still suffers
from performance degradation due the increase of the link speed in today’s networks.
In This paper we proposed a novel algorithm to detect the intruders, who’s trying to
gain access to the network using the packets header parameters such as;
source/destination address, source/destination port, and protocol without the need to
inspect each packet content looking for signatures/patterns. However, the “Packet
Header Matching” algorithm enhances the overall speed of the matching process
between the incoming packet headers against the rule set. We ran the proposed
algorithm to proof the proposed concept in coping with the traffic arrival speeds and
the various bandwidth demands. The achieved results were of significant
enhancement of the overall performance in terms of detection speed.