barns.blog

With 2009 already under-way, progress is happening in my Masters at a steady pace. With just under six months to go until the end of July, my work is in full swing, with a mixture of writing, algorithmic construction, testing and other activities. Over the next month, most of the development work should be completed. This is, of course, somewhat dependant on my teaching not getting too much in the way.

Thereafter, my algorithms and the sfPortscan algorithm from Snort will be tested and statistically analysed. Thereafter, I plan on finalising my write-up and handing in.

In the interim, I have plans to submit papers to several conferences during the course of the year, the first list includes ISSA, RAID, SATNAC, SAICSIT and CISSE (in chronological order of submission dates). I also hope to get a journal article out during the course of the year.

So, onward with 2009…

Writing code to draw graphs rather than using a tool such as Visio sounds like a dream come true, but it comes at a price. Graphviz is a nifty tool which does just this. In this sense, I refer to real graphs, those which have nodes and edges connect nodes together.

Conceptually, and practically, it works pretty well, but its layout engine does not always produce something visually appealing, or simple. It tool a wile to discover how to force it to draw nodes in a specific order. It turns out that you connect them with an edge. Sounds silly to add unwanted edges, but you can tell Grahviz that these nodes are invisible. This allows the problem to be solved.

In practice, it still takes forever to do, as it really is a trial and error process. Despite this, it still produces very nice graphics. Unfortunately it cant produce EPS out of the box, but it will create PostScript. If you use the “ps” type (rather than the “ps2″ type) it is a simple matter of running ps2epsi on it.

I have now submitted the camera-ready version of the ISSA Paper. It will be published under the title An Evaluation of Scan-Detection Algorithms in Network Intrusion Detection Systems.

Abstract:

Network Intrusion Detection Systems are becoming more prevalent as devices to protect a network. However, the methods they use for some forms of detection are flawed. This paper builds upon existing research by van Riel and Irwin which illustrated these flaws in Snort and Bro’s scan-detection engines. Indeed, it has been ascertained that a number of different scanning techniques are not identified by either Snort or Bro.

This paper highlights current research into the improvement of these scan-detection algorithms and presents insight into how this research is being conducted at Rhodes University. This research will improve on the scan-detection engines in Snort and Bro, permitting them to be used in a production environment without fear of succumbing to the false negative problem which currently exists.

I have submitted my Work In Progress Paper for SATNAC, under the title of An Analysis of Network Scanning Traffic as it relates to Scan-Detection in Network Intrusion Detection Systems.

Abstract

Network Intrusion Detection is, in a modern network, a useful tool to detect a wide variety of malicious traffic. The ever present prevalence of scanning activity on the Internet is fair justification to warrant scan detection as a component of network intrusion detection. Whilst current systems are able to perform scan-detection, the methods they use are often flawed and exhibit an inability to detect scans in an efficient and scalable manner.

Existing research by van Riel and Irwin has illustrated a number of flaws present in the open source systems Snort and Bro. This paper builds on this by describing current research at Rhodes University in which these flaws are being addressed. In particular, this research will address the flaws in the scan-detection engines in Snort and Bro by developing new plug-ins for these systems which take into consideration the improvements which are identified over the course of the research.

Today was a little bit slow. I started off well by redoing this site, so that it would produce nifty things such as RSS feeds. Its now using WordPress.

I managed to get the Linux version of InetVis to work with my crafted Ethernet frames which was great. I then started creating tcpdumps of the different types of Nmap scans. These will be analysed with Snort, Bro and InetVis.