Intrusion detection systems have proliferated with varying capabilities for data generation and learning towards detecting abnormal behavior. The goal of green intrusion detection systems is to design intrusion detection systems for energy efficiency, taking into account the resource constraints of embedded devices and analyzing energy–performance–security trade-offs. Towards this goal, we provide a comprehensive survey of existing green intrusion detection systems and analyze their effectiveness in terms of performance, overhead, and energy consumption for a wide variety of low-power embedded systems such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and cyber physical systems. Finally, we provide future directions that can be leveraged by existing systems towards building a secure and greener environment.