Labeling Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS) Rules with MITRE ATT&CK Techniques: Machine Learning vs. Large Language Models

Analysts in Security Operations Centers (SOCs) are often occupied with time-consuming investigations of alerts from Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDSs). Many NIDS rules lack clear explanations and associations with attack techniques, complicating the alert triage and the generation of attack hypotheses. Large Language Models (LLMs) may be a promising technology to reduce the alert explainability gap by associating rules with attack techniques. In this paper, we investigate the ability of three prominent LLMs (ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini) to reason about NIDS rules while labeling them with MITRE ATT&CK tactics and techniques. We discuss prompt design and present experiments performed with 973 Snort rules. Our results indicate that while LLMs provide explainable, scalable, and efficient initial mappings, traditional machine learning (ML) models consistently outperform them in accuracy, achieving higher precision, recall, and F1-scores. These results highlight the potential for hybrid LLM-ML approaches to enhance SOC operations and better address the evolving threat landscape. By utilizing automation, the presented methods will enhance the analysis efficiency of SOC alerts, and decrease workloads for analysts.