IDS mailing list archives
AW: Views and Correlation in Intrusion Detection
From: "Liesen, Detmar (LDS)" <Detmar.Liesen () lds nrw de>
Date: Tue, 1 Jul 2003 07:32:30 +0200
FYI: There is a project on Sourceforge that aims at devoloping an event-vulnerability correlation tool: www.sourceforge.net/projects/threatman The licence will be GPL 2.0. Unfortunately we lack of competent developers who can afford investing some amount of time into this project. Until now we have mainly done development-planning and basic-design. We want to build an open architecture for threat-management that uses IDMEF as normalized message-format and IDXP over TLS (with Roadrunner) as communication protocol. The architecture will be multi-tiered and provide plug-ins for a variety of IDS-products. Our first implementation will be a snort plugin and a nessus plugin, so that snort events and nessus reports can be correlated. If you have the time and skills you're invited to participate... Feel free to browse the devel-docs in our CVS repository. Greetings, Detmar -----Ursprungliche Nachricht----- Von: Richard Ginski [mailto:rginski () co pinellas fl us] Gesendet: Donnerstag, 26. Juni 2003 21:20 An: focus-ids () securityfocus com Betreff: RE: Views and Correlation in Intrusion Detection Warning...possible stupid questions below: Doesn't a major component of such a thing already exist with Intrusion Detection Message Exchange? http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-idwg-requirements-10.txt If so, is it just a matter of vendors wanting to "play together" and implement it in their products? I'm curious if this is the real stumbling block. It seems that correlation has been discussed for a while (years). From what I've experienced, technology doesn't take this long to develop unless "people" don't want to.
"Sekurity Wizard" <s.wizard () boundariez com> 6/25/2003 11:03:04 PM
David, Your are all absolutely correct - correlation is the gold medal...right now everyone in the industry is praying for bronze at best. The one glimmer of hope I see are products out there, and I don't remember the company name right now, that aggregate hundreds of gigabits of logs per hour and try to make sense of it all. The question them becomes one of scalability...assuming we take for granted someone CAN write an engine that processes this sort of data in a sane manner. Scalability, in the form of the type of environment I work at is insanely large. We have umpteen numbers of DS3's, countless T1's and thousands of pipes to and from segments we aren't even *aware of*...not to count the couple of hundred (close to 1,000) firewalls that are out there. Now, let's say we put a couple of these boxes (~50Mbit/sec each) to the test in my environment. There STILL NEEDS TO BE A CENTRAL PROCESSOR...otherwise, we're left with the distributed view - which we don't want, right? Is it realistic to think there is such a scalable system that can process hundreds of gigabits of data per second, aggregate it all, normalize it, and correlate too? I dare say not at this point...unless we come up with some sort of standard, "XML for security devices" that makes the processing and data crunching easier....but the problem there is I don't see Checkpoing, Cisco, Enterasys, and ISS (and others) getting together on this any time soon.... So scalability is our main opponent as I see it...because at the end of the day - the only attack that counts is the 1 in 100,000,000 that sent that single UDP packet that triggered a shutdown of the entire network due to SQL Server port floods...right? Sleep well... :) -----Original Message----- From: DAVID MARKLE [mailto:davidmarkle () comcast net] Sent: Tuesday, June 17, 2003 1:49 PM To: Blake Matheny Cc: focus-ids () securityfocus com; davidmarkle () comcast net Subject: Re: Views and Correlation in Intrusion Detection Blake, I agree with your sentiments regarding correlation and have more to add. The point of correlation is the value it adds to mostly autonomous, unreviewed, and meaningless data. (The folks that disagree with this line must have economically independent budgets with staffing consisting of superstar (I applaud you)). Who reviews the firewall logs? I don't. We have over 500 global firewalls. The point here is (as you stated) AUTOMATION. But it does not stop there. That data has to be normalized and applied towards something. The correlation piece adds that middleware "something". An IDS alert is ONLY relevant if the firewall permits the traffic through. To further the comment, and attack signature tripped for (known attack) xyz, is ONLY relevant when the attacked host is vulnerable to xyz. This is the ultimate job of correlation. If the above surrounding conditions are true, the severity of the attack becomes increased to critical, otherwise it is informational only. There are also netops statistics that should be considered security related (and monitored). Baseline your bandwidth, averaged over 12 months. Normal increases in business offerings are roughly 5 percent per month. Since there was no change control this past weekend (to relate), why did you see a spike in bandwidth by 17 percent ???? Why is tcp 2148 increasing on your global perimeter over the past 3 days? These are relevant questions. Without the collection and aggregation of the appropriate data, we run the operations in the dark. With regards to the state of correlation, I still think its an infancy issue. Historically, I believe that the industry (tech folks) has been extremely focused on growth development and deployment of the technology (firewalls, IDS-(H/N), etc.). Firewalls have been around for awhile and have matured to a point of plateau (mostly). IDS is now in "the growth phase" (with heuristic, anomaly, signature, blah, blah, blah), and all that hype. I really think that the industry had recently realizes that we are now overwhelmed with too much data. Now everyone is scrambling to catch up ..... David Markle davidmarkle () comcast net davidmarkle () elephantfoot org ----- Original Message ----- From: Blake Matheny <bmatheny () mkfifo net> Date: Tuesday, June 17, 2003 1:32 pm Subject: Views and Correlation in Intrusion Detection
Two areas that I have recently been doing research in, are views and their connection to correlation techniques. In terms of systems, given some event, the information we get about the occurrence of such an event comes to us in the form of either a primary or a secondary view. Information about secondary views typically come to us from applications such as firewalls and ID systems. Primary information usually is received from the application
actually
processing this data for use. For instance, an ID sensor may produce an alert about some traffic. However, this is a secondary view of the event and needs to be correlated with other, relevant information. So of course firewall logs might be checked, to see if traffic actually passed that corresponds to the event in question. This is also a secondary view, so a third place is checked, the applications logs. There are really several issues here. First of all, a tremendous amount of time is being spent, trying to correlate all the relevant information. This is something that _can_ be automated. Second, the applications logs may not be trustworthy. Third, and to me, most importantly, is the fact that this is such a 'basic' thing that people using ID systems have to do, and there is no piece of software yet that does this. So something we have been working on, is a system to deal with this basic type of scenario. This will entail data transformations into an intermediarylanguage, an event description language, offline state analysis and several other components (there is more information at http://www.nongnu.org/babe/).If you spend some time thinking about everything involved to do this in a scalable fashion, it's an enormous task (I said basic, not simple). What I am finding frustrating, is that much of the base research has not yet even been done. Much of the research that has been done, is either too primitive or too impractical to be implemented. Is this due to the infancy and immaturity of the field, do people not see this as being feasible and therefor aren'tspending the research time, or is this simply too far down the line? In any case, feedback welcome. Thanks. Cheers, -Blake -- Blake Matheny "... one of the main causes of the fall of
the
bmatheny () mkfifo net Roman Empire was that, lacking zero, they
had
http://www.mkfifo.net no way to indicate successful termination
of
http://ovmj.org/GNUnet/ their C programs." --Robert Firth ------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------ Attend the Black Hat Briefings & Training, July 28 - 31 in Las Vegas, the world's premier technical IT security event! 10 tracks, 15 training sessions, 1,800 delegates from 30 nations including all of the top experts, from CSO's to "underground" security specialists. See for yourself what the buzz is about! Early-bird registration ends July 3. This event will sell out. www.blackhat.com--------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------- Attend the Black Hat Briefings & Training, July 28 - 31 in Las Vegas, the world's premier technical IT security event! 10 tracks, 15 training sessions, 1,800 delegates from 30 nations including all of the top experts, from CSO's to "underground" security specialists. See for yourself what the buzz is about! Early-bird registration ends July 3. This event will sell out. www.blackhat.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Attend the Black Hat Briefings & Training, July 28 - 31 in Las Vegas, the world's premier technical IT security event! 10 tracks, 15 training sessions, 1,800 delegates from 30 nations including all of the top experts, from CSO's to "underground" security specialists. See for yourself what the buzz is about! Early-bird registration ends July 3. This event will sell out. www.blackhat.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Attend the Black Hat Briefings & Training, July 28 - 31 in Las Vegas, the world's premier technical IT security event! 10 tracks, 15 training sessions, 1,800 delegates from 30 nations including all of the top experts, from CSO's to "underground" security specialists. See for yourself what the buzz is about! Early-bird registration ends July 3. This event will sell out. www.blackhat.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Attend the Black Hat Briefings & Training, July 28 - 31 in Las Vegas, the world's premier technical IT security event! 10 tracks, 15 training sessions, 1,800 delegates from 30 nations including all of the top experts, from CSO's to "underground" security specialists. See for yourself what the buzz is about! Early-bird registration ends July 3. This event will sell out. www.blackhat.com -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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- AW: Views and Correlation in Intrusion Detection Liesen, Detmar (LDS) (Jul 02)