Hidden Markov Model Modeling of SSH Brute-Force Attacks

  • Authors:
  • Anna Sperotto;Ramin Sadre;Pieter-Tjerk Boer;Aiko Pras

  • Affiliations:
  • Centre for Telematics and Information Technology, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands 7500 AE;Centre for Telematics and Information Technology, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands 7500 AE;Centre for Telematics and Information Technology, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands 7500 AE;Centre for Telematics and Information Technology, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands 7500 AE

  • Venue:
  • DSOM '09 Proceedings of the 20th IFIP/IEEE International Workshop on Distributed Systems: Operations and Management: Integrated Management of Systems, Services, Processes and People in IT
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Nowadays, network load is constantly increasing and high-speed infrastructures (1-10Gbps) are becoming increasingly common. In this context, flow-based intrusion detection has recently become a promising security mechanism. However, since flows do not provide any information on the content of a communication, it also became more difficult to establish a ground truth for flow-based techniques benchmarking. A possible approach to overcome this problem is the usage of synthetic traffic traces where the generation of malicious traffic is driven by models. In this paper, we propose a flow time series model of SSH brute-force attacks based on Hidden Markov Models. Our results show that the model successfully emulates an attacker behavior, generating meaningful flow time series.