Detecting Abnormal Traffic

Jennifer Rexford
Fall 2010 (TTh 1:30-2:50 in COS 302)

COS 561: Advanced Computer Networks

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall10/cos561/
Intrusions
Intrusions
Actions that attempt to bypass security mechanisms
E.g., unauthorized access, inflicting harm, etc.

Example intrusions
Denial-of-service attacks
Scans
Worms and viruses
Host compromises

Intrusion detection
Monitoring and analyzing traffic
Identifying abnormal activities
Assessing severity and raising alarms 2
Where to Detect Intrusions?
End host: OS or application
Includes logins, file I/O, program executions, etc.
Can work with encrypted traffic and at lower speeds
Avoid extra packet reassembly and ambiguity

Network: at enterprise edge

Single location for detecting and blocking attacks
Avoid reliance on the end host, OS, user, ..
Reduce overhead on the end host and network

Network: in the backbone

Multiple locations for detecting correlations in traffic
Too expensive to inspect the contents of every packet
3
What to Do After Detection?
Passively log
Collect, analyze, and record data
Report results to system/network administrator
Allow human to drive any response
Slower response, but better handling of false positives

Actively defend
Detect problems in real time
Automatically generate a response
E.g., drop the traffic, engage the adversary, fight back
Faster response, but worse handling of false positives

4
How to Detect Intrusions?
The challenge
We dont know all the bad things that could happen
And telling good from bad is fundamentally hard

Anomaly detection
What is usual, is known
What is unusual, is bad

Signature detection
What is bad, is know
What is not bad, is good
5
How to Detect Intrusions?
Anomaly Detection Signature Detection
Patterns Train to create a Codify patterns of
baseline of normal known vulnerabilities
network traffic or attacks
Detection Detect statistically Detect matches to
significant deviations the patterns in the
from normal signatures
Pros Can detect novel Builds on past
(zero day) attacks experiences
Cons May miss low-rate Misses novel attacks;
attacks; high rate of requires continuous
false alarms updates to signatures
6
Anomaly Detection
Traffic volume
Detect deviations in bytes/sec or packets/sec over time
Not effective for detection low-volume attacks

Traffic features
Detect changes in distributions of traffic characteristics
E.g., traffic distribution by IP address, port number,
packet size, TCP flags, etc.
Aids in classifying the anomaly (e.g., DoS vs. port scan)

Detection techniques
Statistical techniques
Machine learning
... 7
Signature Detection
Examples
Excessive login attempts
TCP packet with both SYN and RST set
HTTP with GET /cgi-bin/phf?

alert tcp $EXTERNAL any -> $HTTP_SERVERS $HTTP_PORTS

(msg: WEB-CGI phf access; flow:to_server, established;
uricontent: \phf; nocase; reference: bugtraq, 629;
reference: arachnids, 128; reference: cve, CVE-1999-0067;
classtype: web-application-activity; sid: 886; rev: 8;)

Packet processing
Deep-packet inspection
Regular expression matching
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Hybrid Solution: Arbor Example

anomaly
detection
scrubber

http://www.arbornetworks.com/en/stopping-ddos-attacks.html 9
Challenges
Accuracy
False positives
False negatives

High volume of data

Measuring the traffic at line rate
Real-time analysis of packet streams
Deep-packet inspection
Connection reassembly

Attackers gaming the monitoring system

Splitting offending content across multiple packets
Overloading the monitor
Exploiting ambiguity in which packet the receiver uses 10
Discussion

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Network Security
Denial-of-service mitigation
Pushback and source quenching
Secure Overlay Services

Spam mitigation
Network-based detection of spam

Protecting against bogus DNS and certificates

Comparing results across multiple clients
DNS-SEC

End-to-end encryption: SSL and IPSEC

Clean-slate approaches
Self-certifying addresses
Off by default
Path verification 12
Traffic Measurement
Why is Traffic Measurement Important?
Billing the customer
Measure usage on links to/from customers
Applying billing model to generate a bill

Traffic engineering and capacity planning

Measure the traffic matrix (i.e., offered load)
Tune routing protocol or add new capacity

Denial-of-service attack detection

Identify anomalies in the traffic
Configure routers to block the offending traffic

Analyze application-level issues

Evaluate benefits of deploying a Web caching proxy
Quantify fraction of traffic that is P2P file sharing
Collecting Traffic Data: SNMP
Simple Network Management Protocol
Standard Management Information Base (MIB)
Protocol for querying the MIBs

Advantage: ubiquitous
Supported on all networking equipment
Multiple products for polling and analyzing data

Disadvantages: dumb
Coarse granularity of the measurement data
E.g., number of byte/packet per interface per 5 minutes
Cannot express complex queries on the data
Unreliable delivery of the data using UDP
Collecting Traffic Data: Packet Monitoring

Packet monitoring
Passively collecting IP packets on a link
Recording IP, TCP/UDP, or application-layer traces

Advantages: details
Fine-grain timing information
E.g., can analyze the burstiness of the traffic
Fine-grain packet contents
Addresses, port numbers, TCP flags, URLs, etc.

Disadvantages: overhead
Hard to keep up with high-speed links
Often requires a separate monitoring device
Collecting Traffic Data: Flow Statistics

Flow monitoring (e.g., Cisco Netflow)

Statistics about groups of related packets (e.g., same
IP/TCP headers and close in time)
Recording header information, counts, and time

Advantages: detail with less overhead

Almost as good as packet monitoring, except no fine-
grain timing information or packet contents
Often implemented directly on the interface card

Disadvantages: trade-off detail and overhead

Less detail than packet monitoring
Less ubiquitous than SNMP statistics
Using the Traffic Data in Network Operations

SNMP byte/packet counts: everywhere

Tracking link utilizations and detecting anomalies
Generating bills for traffic on customer links
Inference of the offered load (i.e., traffic matrix)
Packet monitoring: selected locations
Analyzing the small time-scale behavior of traffic
Troubleshooting specific problems on demand
Flow monitoring: selective, e.g,. network edge
Tracking the application mix
Direct computation of the traffic matrix
Input to denial-of-service attack detection
Flow Measurement
Flow Measurement: Outline
Definition
Passively collecting statistics about groups of packets
Group packets based on headers and spacing in time
Essentially a way to aggregate packet measurement data

Scope
Medium-grain information about user behavior
Passively monitoring the link or the interface/router
Helpful in characterizing, detecting, diagnosing, and fixing

Outline
Definition of an IP flow (sequence of related packets)
Flow measurement data and its applications
Mechanics of collecting flow-level measurements
Reducing the overheads of flow-level measurement
IP Flows

flow 1 flow 2 flow 3 flow 4

Set of packets that belong together

Source/destination IP addresses and port numbers
Same protocol, ToS bits,
Same input/output interfaces at a router (if known)

Packets that are close together in time

Maximum spacing between packets (e.g., 30 sec)
Example: flows 2 and 4 are different flows due to time
Flow Abstraction
A flow is not exactly the same as a session
Sequence of related packets may be multiple flows
(due to the close together in time requirement)
Sequence of related packets may not follow the same
links (due to changes in IP routing)

Motivation for this abstraction

As close to a session as possible from inside the
network
Flow switching paradigm from IP-over-ATM technology
Router optimization for forwarding/ACL decisions
(cache the result after the first packet in a flow)
might as well throw in a few counters
Recording Traffic Statistics (e.g., Netflow)

Packet header information (same for every packet)

Source and destination IP addresses
Source and destination TCP/UDP port numbers
Other IP/TCP/UDP header fields (protocol, ToS bits, etc.)

Aggregate traffic information (summary of traffic)

Start/finish time of the flow (time of first & last packet)
Total number of bytes and number of packets in the flow
TCP flags (e.g., logical OR over sequence of packets)

SYN ACK ACK FIN

4 packets
1436 bytes
SYN, ACK, & FIN
start finish
Recording Routing Info (e.g., Netflow)
Input and output interfaces
Input interface is where the packets entered the router
Output interface is the next hop in the forwarding table

Source and destination IP prefix (mask length)

Longest prefix match on the src and dest IP addresses

Source and destination ASnumbers

Origin AS for src/dest prefix in the BGP routing table

forwarding table Processor BGP table

Line card Line card

Switching
Line card Line card
Fabric
Line card Line card
Measuring Traffic as it Flows By

source dest

input output

source dest
prefix prefix

source AS intermediate AS dest AS

Source and destination: IP header

Source and dest prefix: forwarding table or BGP table
Source and destination AS: BGP table
Packet vs. Flow Measurement
Basic statistics (available from both techniques)
Traffic mix by IP addresses, port numbers, and protocol
Average packet size
Traffic over time
Both: traffic volumes on a medium-to-large time scale
Packet: burstiness of the traffic on a small time scale
Statistics per TCP connection
Both: number of packets & bytes transferred over the link
Packet: frequency of lost or out-of-order packets, and the number of
application-level bytes delivered
Per-packet info (available only from packet traces)
TCP seq/ack #s, receiver window, per-packet flags,
Probability distribution of packet sizes
Application-level header and body (full packet contents)
 Collecting Flow Measurements
Route CPU that generates flow records
may degrade forwarding performance
CPU
Router A

Line card that generates flow records

more efficient to support
measurement in each line card
Router A

Packet monitor that generates flow records

Router A Router B third party

Monitor
Router Collecting Flow Measurement
Advantage
No need for separate measurement device(s)
Monitor traffic over all links in/out of router (parallelism)
Ease of providing routing information for each flow

Disadvantage
Requirement for support in the router product(s)
Danger of competing with other 1st-order router features
Possible degradation of the throughput of the router
Difficulty of online analysis/aggregation of data on router

Practical application
View from multiple vantage points (e.g., all edge links)
Packet Monitor Collecting Flow Records
Advantages
No performance impact on packet forwarding
No dependence on support by router vendor
Possibility of customizing the thinning of the data

Disadvantages
Overhead/cost of tapping a link & reconstructing packets
Cost of buying, deploying, and managing extra equipment
No access to routing info (input/output link, IP prefix, etc.)

Practical application
Selective monitoring of a small number of links
Deployment in front of particular services or sites

Packet monitor vendors support flow-level output

Mechanics: Flow Cache
Maintain a cache of active flows
Storage of byte/packet counts, timestamps, etc.

Compute a key per incoming packet

Concatenation of source, destination, port #s, etc.

Index into the flow cache based on the key

Creation or updating of an entry in the flow cache

key #bytes, #packets, start, finish

key
heade
r

packet key #bytes, #packets, start, finish

Mechanics: Evicting Cache Entries
Flow timeout
Remove flows that have not received a packet recently
Periodic sequencing through the cache to time out flows
New packet triggers the creation of a new flow

Cache replacement
Remove flow(s) when the flow cache is full
Evict existing flow(s) upon creating a new cache entry
Apply eviction policy (LRU, random flow, etc.)

Long-lived flows
Remove flow(s) that persist for a long time (e.g., 30 min)
otherwise flow statistics dont become available
and the byte and packet counters might overflow
Sampling: Packet Sampling
Packet sampling before flow creation (Sampled Netflow)
1-out-of-m sampling of individual packets (e.g., m=100)
Create of flow records over the sampled packets

Reducing overhead
Avoid per-packet overhead on (m-1)/m packets
Avoid creating records for a large number of small flows

Increasing overhead (in some cases)

May split some long transfers into multiple flow records
due to larger time gaps between successive packets
time

not sampled

timeout
two flows
Conclusions
Flow measurement
Medium-grain view of traffic on one or more links

Advantages
Lower measurement volume than full packet traces
Available on high-end line cards (Cisco Netflow)
Control over overhead via aggregation and sampling

Disadvantages
Computation and memory requirements for flow cache
Loss of fine-grain timing and per-packet information
Not uniformly supported by router vendors