Providing process origin information to aid in computer forensic investigations

Abstract

The number of computer attacks has been growing dramatically as the Internet has grown. Attackers currently have little or no disincentive to conducting attacks because they are able to hide their location effectively by creating a chain of connections through a series of hosts. This method is effective because most current host audit systems do not maintain enough information to allow association of incoming and outgoing network connections. In this paper, we introduce an inexpensive method that allows both on-line and forensic matching of incoming and outgoing network traffic. Our method makes small modifications to the operating system that associate origin information with each process in the system process table, and enhances the audit information by logging the origin and destination of network sockets. We present implementation results, show that our method can effectively record origin information about a variety of attacks, and describe the limitations of our approach.