Information-Theoretic Measures for Anomaly Detection

  • Authors:
  • Wenke Lee;Dong Xiang

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-

  • Venue:
  • SP '01 Proceedings of the 2001 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

Abstract: Anomaly detection is an essential component of the protection mechanisms against novel attacks. In this paper, we propose to use several information-theoretic measures, namely, entropy, conditional entropy, relative conditional entropy, information gain, and information cost for anomaly detection. These measures can be used to describe the characteristics of an audit data set, suggest the appropriate anomaly detection model(s) to be built, and explain the performance of the model(s). We use case studies on Unix system call data, BSM data, and network tcpdump data to illustrate the utilities of these measures.