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LLMs in Network Intrusion Detection: A Comprehensive Analysis
University of South Florida ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2025
Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) play a critical role in identifying and mitigating malicious activities within computer networks. This thesis explores the application of advanced NLP techniques, particularly LLMs, to enhance NIDS performance. We investigate multiple approaches, including Masked Language Models (MLMs) such as BERT, RoBERTa, and DistilBERT, as well as large-scale generative models like Gemma (2B, 9B, and 27B parameter versions) for intrusion detection tasks. Our study implements standard ML models on NSL-KDD and CICIoT2023 datasets to establish baselines, then applies MLMs both as classifiers and feature extractors. We conduct experiments with various prompting strategies including Zero-Shot, One-Shot, In-Context Learning, and Chain-of-Thought reasoning.