  Intrusion detection systems have become a key component in ensuring the
safety of systems and networks. As networks grow in size and speed continues to
increase, it is crucial that efficient scalable techniques should be developed
for IDS systems. Signature based detection is the most extensively used threat
detection technique for Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS). One of the foremost
challenges for signaturebased IDS systems is how to keep up with large volume
of incoming traffic when each packet needs to be compared with every signature
in the database. When an IDS cannot keep up with the traffic flood, all it can
do is to drop packets, therefore, may miss potential attacks. This paper
proposes a new model called Dynamic Multi-Layer Signature based IDS using
Mobile Agents, which can detect imminent threats with very high success rate by
dynamically and automatically creating and using small and efficient multiple
databases, and at the same time, provide mechanism to update these small
signature databases at regular intervals using Mobile Agents
