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Title page for ETD etd-12312003-014322


Type of Document Master's Thesis
Author Hu, Yiquan ,
Author's Email Address hyqhyq@yahoo.com
URN etd-12312003-014322
Title TIAA: A Toolkit for Intrusion Alert Analysis
Degree Master of Science
Graduate Program Computer Science
Advisory Committee
Advisor Name Title
Peng Ning Committee Chair
Douglas S. Reeves Committee Member
Rudra Dutta Committee Member
Keywords
  • Attack Scenario Analysis
  • Alert Correlation
Date of Defense 2003-12-30
Availability unrestricted
Abstract
HU, YIQUAN. TIAA: A Toolkit for Intrusion Alert Analysis. (Under the direction of Dr. Peng

Ning.)

Intrusion Detection has been studied for about twenty years. Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs)

are usually considered to be the second line of defense to protect against malicious activities along

with the prevention-based security mechanisms such as authentication and access control. How-

ever, traditional IDSs have two major limitations. First, they usually focus on low-level attacks or

anomalies, and raise alerts independently, although there may be logical connections between them.

Second, in a typical environment there are a lot of false alerts reported by traditional IDSs, which

are mixed with true alerts. Thus, the intrusion analysts or the system administrators are often

overwhelmed by the volume of alerts.

To address the aforementioned problems and thus to improve the usability of the current IDSs,

the Toolkit for Intrusion Alert Analysis (TIAA) [17] is developed. The primary goal of TIAA is

to provide system support for interactive analysis of intrusion alerts reported by traditional IDSs.

TIAA is based on the alert correlation techniques previously developed in [16] and [15]. In addition,

several new utilities are developed to facilitate the analysis of potentially large sets of intrusion alerts.

More speci¯cally, these new utilities include alert aggregation/disaggregation, clustering analysis,

frequency analysis, link analysis, and association analysis. Finally, TIAA includes two additional

visual representations of analysis results besides the hyper-alert correlation graphs proposed in [16],

making it easier for a human analyst to understand the analysis results. It is envisaged that a

human analyst and TIAA form a man-machine team, with TIAA performing automated tasks such

as intrusion alert correlation and execution of analysis utilities, and the human analyst deciding

what sets of alerts to analyze and how the analysis utilities are applied.

This thesis presents the implementation of TIAA, including several analysis utilities, an improved

alert collection system, and an integrated analysis environment with a user-friendly graphical user

interface (GUI). This thesis also reports several experiments that evaluate the TIAA system using

DARPA 2000 datasets and Cyber Panel Grand Challenge Problem datasets. The experimental

results show that the TIAA system can greatly improve the analysis of intrusion alerts, and can

cooperate with general underlying IDSs.

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