Case-oriented alert correlation

  • Authors:
  • Jidong Long;Daniel G. Schwartz

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida;Department of Computer Science, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida

  • Venue:
  • WSEAS Transactions on Computers
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Correlating alerts is of importance for identifying complex attacks and discarding false alerts. Most popular alert correlation approaches employ some well-defined knowledge to uncover the connections among alerts. However, acquiring, representing and justifying such knowledge has turned out to be a nontrivial task. In this paper, we propose a novel method to work around these difficulties by using case-based reasoning (CBR). In our application, a case, constructed from training data, serves as an example of correlated alerts. It consists of a pattern of alerts caused by an attack and the identity of the attack. The runtime alert stream is then compared with each case, to see if any subset of the runtime alerts are similar to the pattern in the case. The process is reduced to a matching problem. Two kinds of matching methods were explored. The latter is much more efficient than the former. Our experiments with the DARPA Grand Challenge Problem attack simulator have shown that both produce almost the same results and that case-oriented alert correlation is effective in detecting intrusions.