IDGraphs: Intrusion Detection and Analysis Using Stream Compositing

  • Authors:
  • Pin Ren;Yan Gao;Zhichun Li;Yan Chen;Benjamin Watson

  • Affiliations:
  • Northwestern University;Northwestern University;Northwestern University;Northwestern University;North Carolina State University

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Traffic anomalies and attacks are commonplace in today's networks and identifying them rapidlyand accurately is critical for operators of large networks. For a statistical intrusion detectionsystem (IDS), it's crucial to detect at the flow-level. However, existing IDS systems offer onlylimited support for interactively examining detected intrusions and anomalies, analyzing wormpropagation patterns, and discovering correlated attacks. These problems are becoming even more acuteas the traffic on today's high-speed routers continues to grow. IDGraphs is an interactivevisualization system for intrusion detection that addresses these challenges. The central visualizationin the system is a flow-level trace plotted with time on the horizontal axis and the total number ofunsuccessful connections (indicating suspicious traffic) on the vertical axis. The article summarizes astack of tens or hundreds of thousands of these traces using the histographs technique, whichcomposites the traces and maps data density at each pixel to brightness. Users can zoom into orinteractively query the summary view, performing analysis by highlighting subsets of the traces. Forexample, brushing a linked correlation matrix view highlights traces with similar patterns, revealingdistributed attacks that are difficult to detect using standard statistical analysis. The articlediscusses the application of IDGraphs to a real network router data set with millions of flow-levelrecords representing total traffic in the terabyte range. The system successfully detects and analyzesa variety of attacks and anomalies, including port scanning, worm outbreaks, stealthy TCP SYN flooding,and some distributed attacks.