A framework for multi-stage attack detection

Abstract

Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) are considered as essential mechanisms to ensure reliable security. In an intrusion detection context, none of the main detection approaches (signature-based and anomaly-based) are fully satisfactory. False positives (detected non-attacks) and false negatives (non-detected attacks) are the major limitations of such systems. The generated alerts are elementary and in huge numbers. Hence, alert correlation techniques are used to provide a complementary analysis to link elementary alerts and provide a more global intrusion view. We propose an alert correlation and aggregation framework based on requires/provides model. The objective is to discover the logical relationships between atomic alerts potentially incorporated in multi-stage attacks. The obtained results illustrate that the proposed system can effectively detect coordinated attack with minimum false positives.