RE: Views and Correlation in Intrusion Detection

From: Richard Ginski <rginski(at)co.pinellas.fl.us>
Date: Thu Jun 26 2003 - 15:19:47 EDT

Warning...possible stupid questions below:

Doesn't a major component of such a thing already exist with Intrusion Detection Message Exchange?

http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-idwg-requirements-10.txt

If so, is it just a matter of vendors wanting to "play together" and implement it in their products? I'm curious if this is the real stumbling block. It seems that correlation has been discussed for a while (years). From what I've experienced, technology doesn't take this long to develop unless "people" don't want to.

>>> "Sekurity Wizard" <s.wizard@boundariez.com> 6/25/2003 11:03:04 PM >>>
David,

        Your are all absolutely correct - correlation is the gold medal...right now everyone in the industry is praying for bronze at best. The one glimmer of hope I see are products out there, and I don't
remember the company name right now, that aggregate hundreds of gigabits
of logs per hour and try to make sense of it all. The question them becomes one of scalability...assuming we take for granted someone CAN write an engine that processes this sort of data in a sane manner.

        Scalability, in the form of the type of environment I work at is
insanely large. We have umpteen numbers of DS3's, countless T1's and thousands of pipes to and from segments we aren't even *aware of*...not
to count the couple of hundred (close to 1,000) firewalls that are out there. Now, let's say we put a couple of these boxes (~50Mbit/sec each)
to the test in my environment. There STILL NEEDS TO BE A CENTRAL PROCESSOR...otherwise, we're left with the distributed view - which we don't want, right? Is it realistic to think there is such a scalable system that can process hundreds of gigabits of data per second, aggregate it all, normalize it, and correlate too? I dare say not at this point...unless we come up with some sort of standard, "XML for security devices" that makes the processing and data crunching easier....but the problem there is I don't see Checkpoing, Cisco, Enterasys, and ISS (and others) getting together on this any time soon....

        So scalability is our main opponent as I see it...because at the
end of the day - the only attack that counts is the 1 in 100,000,000 that sent that single UDP packet that triggered a shutdown of the entire
network due to SQL Server port floods...right?

Sleep well... :)

-----Original Message-----
From: DAVID MARKLE [mailto:davidmarkle@comcast.net] Sent: Tuesday, June 17, 2003 1:49 PM
To: Blake Matheny
Cc: focus-ids@securityfocus.com; davidmarkle@comcast.net Subject: Re: Views and Correlation in Intrusion Detection

Blake, I agree with your sentiments regarding correlation and have more

to add.

The point of correlation is the value it adds to mostly autonomous, unreviewed, and meaningless data. (The folks that disagree with this line must have economically independent budgets with staffing consisting of superstar (I applaud you)). Who reviews the firewall logs? I don't. We have over 500 global firewalls. The point here is

(as you stated) AUTOMATION. But it does not stop there. That data has

to be normalized and applied towards something. The correlation piece

adds that middleware "something". An IDS alert is ONLY relevant if the

firewall permits the traffic through. To further the comment, and attack signature tripped for (known attack) xyz, is ONLY relevant when

the attacked host is vulnerable to xyz. This is the ultimate job of correlation. If the above surrounding conditions are true, the severity of the attack becomes increased to critical, otherwise it is informational only. There are also netops statistics that should be considered security related (and monitored). Baseline your bandwidth,

averaged over 12 months. Normal increases in business offerings are roughly 5 percent per month. Since there was no change control this past weekend (to relate), why did you see a spike in bandwidth by 17 percent ???? Why is tcp 2148 increasing on your global perimeter over

the past 3 days? These are relevant questions. Without the collection

and aggregation of the appropriate data, we run the operations in the dark.

With regards to the state of correlation, I still think its an infancy

issue. Historically, I believe that the industry (tech folks) has been

extremely focused on growth development and deployment of the technology (firewalls, IDS-(H/N), etc.). Firewalls have been around for awhile and have matured to a point of plateau (mostly). IDS is now

in "the growth phase" (with heuristic, anomaly, signature, blah, blah,

blah), and all that hype. I really think that the industry had recently realizes that we are now overwhelmed with too much data. Now everyone is scrambling to catch up .....

David Markle
davidmarkle@comcast.net
davidmarkle@elephantfoot.org

• Original Message ----- From: Blake Matheny <bmatheny@mkfifo.net> Date: Tuesday, June 17, 2003 1:32 pm Subject: Views and Correlation in Intrusion Detection

> Two areas that I have recently been doing research in, are views
actually
> processing this data for use. For instance, an ID sensor may
> produce an alert
> about some traffic. However, this is a secondary view of the event
> and needs
> to be correlated with other, relevant information. So of course
> firewall logs
> might be checked, to see if traffic actually passed that
> corresponds to the
> event in question. This is also a secondary view, so a third place
> is checked,
> the applications logs.
> There are really several issues here. First of all, a tremendous
> amount of
> time is being spent, trying to correlate all the relevant
> information. This is
> something that _can_ be automated. Second, the applications logs
> may not be
> trustworthy. Third, and to me, most importantly, is the fact that
> this is such
> a 'basic' thing that people using ID systems have to do, and there
> is no piece
> of software yet that does this.
> So something we have been working on, is a system to deal with
> this basic
> type of scenario. This will entail data transformations into an
> intermediarylanguage, an event description language, offline state
> analysis and several
> other components (there is more information at
> http://www.nongnu.org/babe/).If you spend some time thinking about
> everything involved to do this in a
> scalable fashion, it's an enormous task (I said basic, not
> simple). What I am
> finding frustrating, is that much of the base research has not yet
> even been
> done. Much of the research that has been done, is either too
> primitive or too
> impractical to be implemented. Is this due to the infancy and
> immaturity of
> the field, do people not see this as being feasible and therefor
> aren'tspending the research time, or is this simply too far down
> the line? In any
the
> bmatheny@mkfifo.net Roman Empire was that, lacking zero, they
had
> http://www.mkfifo.net no way to indicate successful termination
of
> http://ovmj.org/GNUnet/ their C programs." --Robert Firth

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Attend the Black Hat Briefings & Training, July 28 - 31 in Las Vegas, the
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Attend the Black Hat Briefings & Training, July 28 - 31 in Las Vegas, the world's premier technical IT security event! 10 tracks, 15 training sessions, 1,800 delegates from 30 nations including all of the top experts, from CSO's to "underground" security specialists. See for yourself what the buzz is about! Early-bird registration ends July 3. This event will sell out. www.blackhat.com

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Received on Fri Jun 27 13:47:37 2003