Section: New Results

Intrusion detection

Alert Correlation in Distributed Systems

In large systems, multiple (host and network) Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) and many sensors are usually deployed. They continuously and independently generate notifications (event's observations, warnings and alerts). To cope with this amount of collected data, alert correlation systems have to be designed. An alert correlation system aims at exploiting the known relationships between some elements that appear in the flow of low level notifications to generate high semantic meta-alerts. The main goal is to reduce the number of alerts returned to the security administrator and to allow a higher level analysis of the situation. However, producing correlation rules is a highly difficult operation, as it requires both the knowledge of an attacker, and the knowledge of the functionalities of all IDSes involved in the detection process. In [59] , [38] , [19] , we focus on the transformation process that allows to translate the description of a complex attack scenario into correlation rules and its assessment. We show that, once a human expert has provided an action tree derived from an attack tree, a fully automated transformation process can generate exhaustive correlation rules that would be tedious and error prone to enumerate by hand. The transformation relies on a detailed description of various aspects of the real execution environment (topology of the system, deployed services, etc.). Consequently, the generated correlation rules are tightly linked to the characteristics of the monitored information system. The proposed transformation process has been implemented in a prototype that generates correlation rules expressed in an attack description language called Adele. Additionally, a work has been performed to assess the approach on real environment, and to evaluate the accuracy of the rules built.

In the context of the PhD of Mouna Hkimi, we propose a approach to detect intrusions that affect the behavior of distributed applications. To determine whether an observed behavior is normal or not (occurence of an attack), we rely on a model of normal behavior. This model has been built during an initial training phase. During this preliminary phase, the application is executed several times in a safe environment. The gathered traces (sequences of actions) are used to generate an automaton that characterizes all these acceptable behaviors. To reduce the size of the automaton and to be able to accept more general behaviors that are close to the observed traces, the automaton is transformed. These transformations may lead to introduce unacceptable behaviors. Our curent work aims at identifying the possible errors tolerated by the compacted automaton.

Android Malware Analysis

We explore how information flows induced by a tainted application are helpful to understand how this tainted application interacts within other components inside the operating system. For that purpose, we have defined a new data structure called System Flow Graph representing in a graph how a marked data is disseminated (inside the operating system). We have shown that this data structure is helpful to understand and represent malicious behaviors [31] . Our main challenge is thus to be able to produce relevant graphs which means being able to really observe malicious executions.

For that purpose we developed GroddDroid [25] a tool dedicated to the automatic triggering of Android malware. GroddDroid makes a first static analysis of the application bytecode. During this analysis, GroddDroid identifies the suspicious parts of the bytecode and modifies the bytecode in order to exhibit an execution path that leads to these suspicious parts. The application is later reconstructed/recompiled in order to be executed. This way, GroddDroid offers a way to force the suspicious code to be executed and then observed.

Comparative Study of Alert Formats

In the context of the SECEF project, we conduced a comparative study of different existing alert formats [39] . We analyzed two proprietary formats, CEF (HP ArcSight) and LEEF (IBM QRADAR), as well as 4 standard formats, IDMEF (IETF), CEE (MITRE), CIM and CADF (DMTF). We proposed several metrics to compare them based on an accurate revue of every fields proposed by each format. The results show that IDMEF is the most expressive and structured format. However, some fields proposed by other formats are not covered in IDMEF. We proposed some modification of the alert format to take those limitations into account.

Visualization

This year, research on viusalization for security was oriented towards two objectives. First, as we did during the previous years, we tried to provide solution for security analysts to better analyze a posteriori events related to security that are happening on a system. Christopher Humphries, who was the first CIDre Ph.D. student on this topic defended his Ph.D. Thesis User-Centered Security Events Visualization this December. We should also mention that we presented a prototype of our tool ELVIS during the FIC 2015 in Lille on the Pôle Cyber-Défense area.

This year, we also started research on a new topic in visualization for security. By contrast with our previous work that was dedicated to forensics, i.e. a posteriori analysis of security events, we started this year to study real time analysis of alerts generated by an IDS. The idea here is to allow better monitoring of what is currently happening on a system. We proposed VEGAS, a tool that allows front-line security operators to perform a first triage of the alerts to provide consistent groups of alerts to security analysts. A new Ph.D. student, Damien Crémilleux, was hired on a DGA-MI funding, to work on this topic. VEGAS was presented during the poster session of VizSec 2015 [58] that took place in Chicago, Illinois, USA on the 26th of October 2015.