Behavioral Authentication of Server Flows

  • Authors:
  • James P. Early;Carla E. Brodley;Catherine Rosenberg

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-

  • Venue:
  • ACSAC '03 Proceedings of the 19th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

Understanding the nature of the information flowing intoand out of a system or network is fundamental to determiningif there is adherence to a usage policy. Traditional methodsof determining traffic type rely on the port label carriedin the packet header. This method can fail, however, in thepresence of proxy servers that re-map port numbers or hostservices that have been compromised to act as backdoors orcovert channels.We present an approach to classify server traffic basedon decision trees learned during a training phase. The treesare constructed from traffic described using a set of featureswe designed to capture stream behavior. Because our classificationof the traffic type is independent of port label, it providesa more accurate classification in the presence of maliciousactivity. An empirical evaluation illustrates that modelsof both aggregate protocol behavior and host-specificprotocol behavior obtain classification accuracies rangingfrom 82-100%.