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Title page for ETD etd-05122003-173102


Type of Document Master's Thesis
Author Serrano, Alfredo ,
Author's Email Address aserran@unity.ncsu.edu
URN etd-05122003-173102
Title INTEGRATING ALERTS FROM MULTIPLE HOMOGENEOUS INTRUSION DETECTION SYSTEMS
Degree Master of Science
Graduate Program Computer Science
Advisory Committee
Advisor Name Title
Dr. Peng Ning Committee Chair
Dr. Douglas S. Reeves Committee Member
Dr. Rudra Dutta Committee Member
Keywords
  • Intrusion Detection
  • Alert Correlation
  • Intrusion Detection Systems
  • Security
Date of Defense 2003-04-17
Availability unrestricted
Abstract
Serrano, Alfredo. Integrating Alerts From Multiple Homogeneous Intrusion Detection

Systems. (Under the direction of Dr. Peng Ning.)

Intrusion Detection is a relatively young area of research, begun in the early 1980?s.

Currently most intrusion detection systems (IDSs) produce a large number of alerts based on

low level attacks or anomalies. More distressing is that a large number of alerts are false

positives. The false alert rate becomes even more important as networks become larger.

Effectively monitoring a large network requires the deployment of multiple intrusion

detection systems at key points on the network. Yet, this deployment increases the number

of alerts that administrators must attend to. In addition, since most IDSs produce alerts based

on low-level attacks, they give no indication about the relationship between alerts.

In this work, we describe a method for correlating intrusion alerts from low level alerts

produced by multiple homogenous IDSs. Our technique extends the intrusion alert

correlation technique developed at North Carolina State University, which uses an intrusion

alert?s prerequisites and consequences to construct high-level attack scenarios. The

prerequisite of an alert specifies what must be true in order for the corresponding attack to be

successful, and the consequences describe what can possibly be true if the attack succeeds.

The extended technique relaxes the temporal constrains on alert from different IDSs to

account for any possible timestamp inconsistencies (due to network delays, lack of system

clock synchronization, host workload).

Our correlation method reduces alert volume, and improves performance with reduction in

false positives compared to uncorrelated alerts. Our correlation of alerts from multiple

intrusion systems provides for an automated method to show not only the relationship

between alerts from one IDS, but also the relationships between alerts from different IDSs.

Therefore, our method gives a more complete view of attack scenarios.

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