High-quality attack graph-based IDS correlation
- 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.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.…
Author details: | Sebastian Roschke, Feng ChengGND, Christoph MeinelORCiDGND |
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DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1093/jigpal/jzs034 |
ISSN: | 1367-0751 |
Title of parent work (English): | Logic journal of the IGPL |
Publisher: | Oxford Univ. Press |
Place of publishing: | Oxford |
Publication type: | Article |
Language: | English |
Year of first publication: | 2013 |
Publication year: | 2013 |
Release date: | 2017/03/26 |
Tag: | Correlation; HMM; IDS; attack graph; multi-core |
Volume: | 21 |
Issue: | 4 |
Number of pages: | 21 |
First page: | 571 |
Last Page: | 591 |
Organizational units: | An-Institute / Hasso-Plattner-Institut für Digital Engineering gGmbH |
Peer review: | Referiert |