User identification via process profiling: extended abstract

  • Authors:
  • Steve McKinney;Douglas S. Reeves

  • Affiliations:
  • N.C. State University, Raleigh, NC;N.C. State University, Raleigh, NC

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 5th Annual Workshop on Cyber Security and Information Intelligence Research: Cyber Security and Information Intelligence Challenges and Strategies
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Insiders are authorized persons who possess special privileges of access; these privileges in some cases may be abused. One way in which an insider attack may occur is when user X makes use of user Y's unattended (but logged in) computer, and masquerades as user Y. This paper presents a method of masquerade detection. A light-weight monitor collected information about computer usage by employees of a small organization for a period of three weeks. A profile of each user was developed using a Naïve Bayes classifier that analyzed handle counts of processes as the input. Under conditions specified in the paper, users were correctly identified using this technique approximately 97% of the time, with a misidentification rate of .4%.