A First-Principles Evaluation of Graph-Based Network Intrusion Detection Systems

Abstract

Graph-based network intrusion detection systems (GIDS) report strong benchmark detection metrics, but those metrics establish little about deployability. We approach the problem from first principles: rather than inheriting the preprocessing, windowing, and thresholding conventions of each published system, we ask what a controlled comparison requires and impose it uniformly. The result is GIDS-Eval, an evaluation framework that decomposes a GIDS into six interchangeable stages and turns those conventions into explicit experimental variables, so reported performance can be attributed to individual stages instead of whole pipelines. We survey nine representative GIDS, reimplement five of them within GIDS-Eval, and evaluate them on four datasets under one matched protocol. We identify nine recurring evaluation gaps and quantify the impact of each: two crafted edges achieve full evasion against three of the eight detector-dataset pairs with anything to hide; the snapshot window alone accounts for a mean 38.3% relative swing in average precision (AP); aligning preprocessing across systems moves AP by up to 61.8 percentage points for a single detector; and none of the 18 detector-dataset pairs we replay can alert as events arrive. We introduce GIDS-Lite, an encoder-free control built in the same framework, which ranks first by AP on two of the four datasets at up to 575$\times$ lower runtime. Architectural complexity is therefore not a consistent driver of detection quality under our matched protocol on current benchmarks, but it does enlarge the runtime, calibration, and attack surfaces operators must defend.