TY - JOUR A1 - Roschke, Sebastian A1 - Cheng, Feng A1 - Meinel, Christoph T1 - An alert correlation platform for memory-supported techniques JF - Concurrency and computation : practice & experience N2 - Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) have been widely deployed in practice for detecting malicious behavior on network communication and hosts. False-positive alerts are a popular problem for most IDS approaches. The solution to address this problem is to enhance the detection process by correlation and clustering of alerts. To meet the practical requirements, this process needs to be finished fast, which is a challenging task as the amount of alerts in large-scale IDS deployments is significantly high. We identifytextitdata storage and processing algorithms to be the most important factors influencing the performance of clustering and correlation. We propose and implement a highly efficient alert correlation platform. For storage, a column-based database, an In-Memory alert storage, and memory-based index tables lead to significant improvements of the performance. For processing, algorithms are designed and implemented which are optimized for In-Memory databases, e.g. an attack graph-based correlation algorithm. The platform can be distributed over multiple processing units to share memory and processing power. A standardized interface is designed to provide a unified view of result reports for end users. The efficiency of the platform is tested by practical experiments with several alert storage approaches, multiple algorithms, as well as a local and a distributed deployment. KW - memory-based correlation KW - memory-based clustering KW - memory-based databases KW - IDS management Y1 - 2012 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1002/cpe.1750 SN - 1532-0626 VL - 24 IS - 10 SP - 1123 EP - 1136 PB - Wiley-Blackwell CY - Hoboken ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Roschke, Sebastian A1 - Cheng, Feng A1 - Meinel, Christoph T1 - High-quality attack graph-based IDS correlation JF - Logic journal of the IGPL N2 - Intrusion Detection Systems are widely deployed in computer networks. As modern attacks are getting more sophisticated and the number of sensors and network nodes grow, the problem of false positives and alert analysis becomes more difficult to solve. Alert correlation was proposed to analyse alerts and to decrease false positives. Knowledge about the target system or environment is usually necessary for efficient alert correlation. For representing the environment information as well as potential exploits, the existing vulnerabilities and their Attack Graph (AG) is used. It is useful for networks to generate an AG and to organize certain vulnerabilities in a reasonable way. In this article, a correlation algorithm based on AGs is designed that is capable of detecting multiple attack scenarios for forensic analysis. It can be parameterized to adjust the robustness and accuracy. A formal model of the algorithm is presented and an implementation is tested to analyse the different parameters on a real set of alerts from a local network. To improve the speed of the algorithm, a multi-core version is proposed and a HMM-supported version can be used to further improve the quality. The parallel implementation is tested on a multi-core correlation platform, using CPUs and GPUs. KW - Correlation KW - attack graph KW - HMM KW - multi-core KW - IDS Y1 - 2013 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1093/jigpal/jzs034 SN - 1367-0751 VL - 21 IS - 4 SP - 571 EP - 591 PB - Oxford Univ. Press CY - Oxford ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Kurbel, Karl A1 - Nowak, Dawid A1 - Azodi, Amir A1 - Jaeger, David A1 - Meinel, Christoph A1 - Cheng, Feng A1 - Sapegin, Andrey A1 - Gawron, Marian A1 - Morelli, Frank A1 - Stahl, Lukas A1 - Kerl, Stefan A1 - Janz, Mariska A1 - Hadaya, Abdulmasih A1 - Ivanov, Ivaylo A1 - Wiese, Lena A1 - Neves, Mariana A1 - Schapranow, Matthieu-Patrick A1 - Fähnrich, Cindy A1 - Feinbube, Frank A1 - Eberhardt, Felix A1 - Hagen, Wieland A1 - Plauth, Max A1 - Herscheid, Lena A1 - Polze, Andreas A1 - Barkowsky, Matthias A1 - Dinger, Henriette A1 - Faber, Lukas A1 - Montenegro, Felix A1 - Czachórski, Tadeusz A1 - Nycz, Monika A1 - Nycz, Tomasz A1 - Baader, Galina A1 - Besner, Veronika A1 - Hecht, Sonja A1 - Schermann, Michael A1 - Krcmar, Helmut A1 - Wiradarma, Timur Pratama A1 - Hentschel, Christian A1 - Sack, Harald A1 - Abramowicz, Witold A1 - Sokolowska, Wioletta A1 - Hossa, Tymoteusz A1 - Opalka, Jakub A1 - Fabisz, Karol A1 - Kubaczyk, Mateusz A1 - Cmil, Milena A1 - Meng, Tianhui A1 - Dadashnia, Sharam A1 - Niesen, Tim A1 - Fettke, Peter A1 - Loos, Peter A1 - Perscheid, Cindy A1 - Schwarz, Christian A1 - Schmidt, Christopher A1 - Scholz, Matthias A1 - Bock, Nikolai A1 - Piller, Gunther A1 - Böhm, Klaus A1 - Norkus, Oliver A1 - Clark, Brian A1 - Friedrich, Björn A1 - Izadpanah, Babak A1 - Merkel, Florian A1 - Schweer, Ilias A1 - Zimak, Alexander A1 - Sauer, Jürgen A1 - Fabian, Benjamin A1 - Tilch, Georg A1 - Müller, David A1 - Plöger, Sabrina A1 - Friedrich, Christoph M. A1 - Engels, Christoph A1 - Amirkhanyan, Aragats A1 - van der Walt, Estée A1 - Eloff, J. H. P. A1 - Scheuermann, Bernd A1 - Weinknecht, Elisa ED - Meinel, Christoph ED - Polze, Andreas ED - Oswald, Gerhard ED - Strotmann, Rolf ED - Seibold, Ulrich ED - Schulzki, Bernhard T1 - HPI Future SOC Lab BT - Proceedings 2015 N2 - Das Future SOC Lab am HPI ist eine Kooperation des Hasso-Plattner-Instituts mit verschiedenen Industriepartnern. Seine Aufgabe ist die Ermöglichung und Förderung des Austausches zwischen Forschungsgemeinschaft und Industrie. Am Lab wird interessierten Wissenschaftlern eine Infrastruktur von neuester Hard- und Software kostenfrei für Forschungszwecke zur Verfügung gestellt. Dazu zählen teilweise noch nicht am Markt verfügbare Technologien, die im normalen Hochschulbereich in der Regel nicht zu finanzieren wären, bspw. Server mit bis zu 64 Cores und 2 TB Hauptspeicher. Diese Angebote richten sich insbesondere an Wissenschaftler in den Gebieten Informatik und Wirtschaftsinformatik. Einige der Schwerpunkte sind Cloud Computing, Parallelisierung und In-Memory Technologien. In diesem Technischen Bericht werden die Ergebnisse der Forschungsprojekte des Jahres 2015 vorgestellt. Ausgewählte Projekte stellten ihre Ergebnisse am 15. April 2015 und 4. November 2015 im Rahmen der Future SOC Lab Tag Veranstaltungen vor. KW - Future SOC Lab KW - Forschungsprojekte KW - Multicore Architekturen KW - In-Memory Technologie KW - Cloud Computing KW - maschinelles Lernen KW - künstliche Intelligenz Y1 - 2017 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-102516 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Azodi, Amir A1 - Cheng, Feng A1 - Meinel, Christoph T1 - Event Driven Network Topology Discovery and Inventory Listing Using REAMS JF - Wireless personal communications : an international journal N2 - Network Topology Discovery and Inventory Listing are two of the primary features of modern network monitoring systems (NMS). Current NMSs rely heavily on active scanning techniques for discovering and mapping network information. Although this approach works, it introduces some major drawbacks such as the performance impact it can exact, specially in larger network environments. As a consequence, scans are often run less frequently which can result in stale information being presented and used by the network monitoring system. Alternatively, some NMSs rely on their agents being deployed on the hosts they monitor. In this article, we present a new approach to Network Topology Discovery and Network Inventory Listing using only passive monitoring and scanning techniques. The proposed techniques rely solely on the event logs produced by the hosts and network devices present within a network. Finally, we discuss some of the advantages and disadvantages of our approach. KW - Network topology KW - Inventory systems KW - Network monitoring KW - Network graph KW - Service detection KW - Event processing KW - Event normalization Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-015-3061-3 SN - 0929-6212 SN - 1572-834X VL - 94 SP - 415 EP - 430 PB - Springer CY - New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Sapegin, Andrey A1 - Jaeger, David A1 - Cheng, Feng A1 - Meinel, Christoph T1 - Towards a system for complex analysis of security events in large-scale networks JF - Computers & security : the international journal devoted to the study of the technical and managerial aspects of computer security N2 - After almost two decades of development, modern Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems still face issues with normalisation of heterogeneous data sources, high number of false positive alerts and long analysis times, especially in large-scale networks with high volumes of security events. In this paper, we present our own prototype of SIEM system, which is capable of dealing with these issues. For efficient data processing, our system employs in-memory data storage (SAP HANA) and our own technologies from the previous work, such as the Object Log Format (OLF) and high-speed event normalisation. We analyse normalised data using a combination of three different approaches for security analysis: misuse detection, query-based analytics, and anomaly detection. Compared to the previous work, we have significantly improved our unsupervised anomaly detection algorithms. Most importantly, we have developed a novel hybrid outlier detection algorithm that returns ranked clusters of anomalies. It lets an operator of a SIEM system to concentrate on the several top-ranked anomalies, instead of digging through an unsorted bundle of suspicious events. We propose to use anomaly detection in a combination with signatures and queries, applied on the same data, rather than as a full replacement for misuse detection. In this case, the majority of attacks will be captured with misuse detection, whereas anomaly detection will highlight previously unknown behaviour or attacks. We also propose that only the most suspicious event clusters need to be checked by an operator, whereas other anomalies, including false positive alerts, do not need to be explicitly checked if they have a lower ranking. We have proved our concepts and algorithms on a dataset of 160 million events from a network segment of a big multinational company and suggest that our approach and methods are highly relevant for modern SIEM systems. KW - Intrusion detection KW - SAP HANA KW - In-memory KW - Security KW - Machine learning KW - Anomaly detection KW - Outlier detection Y1 - 2017 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cose.2017.02.001 SN - 0167-4048 SN - 1872-6208 VL - 67 SP - 16 EP - 34 PB - Elsevier Science CY - Oxford ER - TY - GEN A1 - Gawron, Marian A1 - Cheng, Feng A1 - Meinel, Christoph T1 - PVD: Passive Vulnerability Detection T2 - 8th International Conference on Information and Communication Systems (ICICS) N2 - The identification of vulnerabilities relies on detailed information about the target infrastructure. The gathering of the necessary information is a crucial step that requires an intensive scanning or mature expertise and knowledge about the system even though the information was already available in a different context. In this paper we propose a new method to detect vulnerabilities that reuses the existing information and eliminates the necessity of a comprehensive scan of the target system. Since our approach is able to identify vulnerabilities without the additional effort of a scan, we are able to increase the overall performance of the detection. Because of the reuse and the removal of the active testing procedures, our approach could be classified as a passive vulnerability detection. We will explain the approach and illustrate the additional possibility to increase the security awareness of users. Therefore, we applied the approach on an experimental setup and extracted security relevant information from web logs. Y1 - 2017 SN - 978-1-5090-4243-2 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1109/IACS.2017.7921992 SN - 2471-125X SP - 322 EP - 327 PB - IEEE CY - New York ER - TY - GEN A1 - Torkura, Kennedy A. A1 - Sukmana, Muhammad Ihsan Haikal A1 - Cheng, Feng A1 - Meinel, Christoph T1 - Leveraging cloud native design patterns for security-as-a-service applications T2 - IEEE International Conference on Smart Cloud (SmartCloud) N2 - This paper discusses a new approach for designing and deploying Security-as-a-Service (SecaaS) applications using cloud native design patterns. Current SecaaS approaches do not efficiently handle the increasing threats to computer systems and applications. For example, requests for security assessments drastically increase after a high-risk security vulnerability is disclosed. In such scenarios, SecaaS applications are unable to dynamically scale to serve requests. A root cause of this challenge is employment of architectures not specifically fitted to cloud environments. Cloud native design patterns resolve this challenge by enabling certain properties e.g. massive scalability and resiliency via the combination of microservice patterns and cloud-focused design patterns. However adopting these patterns is a complex process, during which several security issues are introduced. In this work, we investigate these security issues, we redesign and deploy a monolithic SecaaS application using cloud native design patterns while considering appropriate, layered security counter-measures i.e. at the application and cloud networking layer. Our prototype implementation out-performs traditional, monolithic applications with an average Scanner Time of 6 minutes, without compromising security. Our approach can be employed for designing secure, scalable and performant SecaaS applications that effectively handle unexpected increase in security assessment requests. KW - Cloud-Security KW - Security-as-a-Service KW - Vulnerability Assessment KW - Cloud Native Applications Y1 - 2017 SN - 978-1-5386-3684-8 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1109/SmartCloud.2017.21 SP - 90 EP - 97 PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers CY - New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Peng, Junjie A1 - Liu, Danxu A1 - Wang, Yingtao A1 - Zeng, Ying A1 - Cheng, Feng A1 - Zhang, Wenqiang T1 - Weight-based strategy for an I/O-intensive application at a cloud data center JF - Concurrency and computation : practice & experience N2 - Applications with different characteristics in the cloud may have different resources preferences. However, traditional resource allocation and scheduling strategies rarely take into account the characteristics of applications. Considering that an I/O-intensive application is a typical type of application and that frequent I/O accesses, especially small files randomly accessing the disk, may lead to an inefficient use of resources and reduce the quality of service (QoS) of applications, a weight allocation strategy is proposed based on the available resources that a physical server can provide as well as the characteristics of the applications. Using the weight obtained, a resource allocation and scheduling strategy is presented based on the specific application characteristics in the data center. Extensive experiments show that the strategy is correct and can guarantee a high concurrency of I/O per second (IOPS) in a cloud data center with high QoS. Additionally, the strategy can efficiently improve the utilization of the disk and resources of the data center without affecting the service quality of applications. KW - IOPS KW - process scheduling KW - random I KW - O KW - small files KW - weight Y1 - 2018 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1002/cpe.4648 SN - 1532-0626 SN - 1532-0634 VL - 30 IS - 19 PB - Wiley CY - Hoboken ER - TY - GEN A1 - Sukmana, Muhammad Ihsan Haikal A1 - Torkura, Kennedy A. A1 - Graupner, Hendrik A1 - Cheng, Feng A1 - Meinel, Christoph T1 - Unified Cloud Access Control Model for Cloud Storage Broker T2 - 33rd International Conference on Information Networking (ICOIN 2019) N2 - Cloud Storage Broker (CSB) provides value-added cloud storage service for enterprise usage by leveraging multi-cloud storage architecture. However, it raises several challenges for managing resources and its access control in multiple Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) for authorized CSB stakeholders. In this paper we propose unified cloud access control model that provides the abstraction of CSP's services for centralized and automated cloud resource and access control management in multiple CSPs. Our proposal offers role-based access control for CSB stakeholders to access cloud resources by assigning necessary privileges and access control list for cloud resources and CSB stakeholders, respectively, following privilege separation concept and least privilege principle. We implement our unified model in a CSB system called CloudRAID for Business (CfB) with the evaluation result shows it provides system-and-cloud level security service for cfB and centralized resource and access control management in multiple CSPs. KW - Cloud Storage Broker KW - Cloud access control and resource management KW - Unified cloud model KW - Privilege separation concept KW - Least privilege principle KW - Role-based access control Y1 - 2019 SN - 978-1-5386-8350-7 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1109/ICOIN.2019.8717982 SN - 1976-7684 SP - 60 EP - 65 PB - IEEE CY - Los Alamitos ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Torkura, Kennedy A. A1 - Sukmana, Muhammad Ihsan Haikal A1 - Cheng, Feng A1 - Meinel, Christoph T1 - CloudStrike BT - chaos engineering for security and resiliency in cloud infrastructure JF - IEEE access : practical research, open solutions N2 - Most cyber-attacks and data breaches in cloud infrastructure are due to human errors and misconfiguration vulnerabilities. Cloud customer-centric tools are imperative for mitigating these issues, however existing cloud security models are largely unable to tackle these security challenges. Therefore, novel security mechanisms are imperative, we propose Risk-driven Fault Injection (RDFI) techniques to address these challenges. RDFI applies the principles of chaos engineering to cloud security and leverages feedback loops to execute, monitor, analyze and plan security fault injection campaigns, based on a knowledge-base. The knowledge-base consists of fault models designed from secure baselines, cloud security best practices and observations derived during iterative fault injection campaigns. These observations are helpful for identifying vulnerabilities while verifying the correctness of security attributes (integrity, confidentiality and availability). Furthermore, RDFI proactively supports risk analysis and security hardening efforts by sharing security information with security mechanisms. We have designed and implemented the RDFI strategies including various chaos engineering algorithms as a software tool: CloudStrike. Several evaluations have been conducted with CloudStrike against infrastructure deployed on two major public cloud infrastructure: Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform. The time performance linearly increases, proportional to increasing attack rates. Also, the analysis of vulnerabilities detected via security fault injection has been used to harden the security of cloud resources to demonstrate the effectiveness of the security information provided by CloudStrike. Therefore, we opine that our approaches are suitable for overcoming contemporary cloud security issues. KW - cloud security KW - security chaos engineering KW - resilient architectures KW - security risk assessment Y1 - 2020 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3007338 SN - 2169-3536 VL - 8 SP - 123044 EP - 123060 PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers  CY - Piscataway ER -