ASAX: Software architecture and rule-based language for universal audit trail analysis

Habra, Naji; Charlier, Baudouin Le; Mounji, A.; Mathieu, Isabelle

doi:10.1007/bfb0013912

Cited by 55 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…Among these are the methods based on rule-based expert systems (Sebring et al,1988;Garvey and Lunt, 1991;Habra et al, 1992;Pouzol and Ducasse, 2002) and attack graphbased approaches (Kumar and Spa ord, 1994;Kumar, 1995;Staniford-Chen et al, 1996;Lin, Wang and Jajodia, 1998;Sheyner et al, 2002). Several works have focused on languages for specifying attack signatures (Michel and Me, 2001;Kruegel and Toth, 2002;Totel, Vivinis and Me, 2004;Raihan and Zulkernine, 2005) and state-transition analysis of anomalous system behaviour (Ilgun,1993;Ilgun, Kemmerer and Porras, 1995;d'Auriol and Surapaneni, 2004).…”

Section: Related Modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Software fault tree and coloured Petri net based specification, design and implementation of agent-based intrusion detection systems

Helmer¹,

Wong²,

Slagell³

et al. 2007

IJICS

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Abstract:The integration of Software Fault Tree (SFT), which describes intrusions and Coloured Petri Nets (CPNs) that specifies design, is examined for an Intrusion Detection System (IDS). The IDS under development is a collection of mobile agents that detect, classify, and correlate the system and network activities. SFTs, augmented with nodes that describe trust, temporal and contextual relationships, are used to describe intrusions. CPNs for intrusion detection are built using CPN templates created from the augmented SFTs. Hierarchical CPNs are created to detect critical stages of intrusions. The agentbased implementation of the IDS is then constructed from the CPNs. Examples of intrusions and descriptions of the prototype implementation are used to demonstrate how the CPN approach has been used in the development of the IDS.The main contribution of this paper is an approach to systematic specification, design and implementation of an IDS; Innovations include (1) using stages of intrusions to structure the specification and design of the IDS; (2) augmentation of SFT with trust, temporal and contextual nodes to model intrusions; (3) algorithmic construction of CPNs from augmented SFT; and (4) generation of mobile agents from CPNs.Keywords: coloured Petri nets; information and computer security; intrusion detection systems; mobile agents; software fault tree analysis.Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Helmer, G., Wong, J., Slagell, M., Honavar, V., Miller, L., Wang, Y., Wang, X. and Stakhanova, N. (2007) 'Software fault tree and coloured Petri net-based specification, design and implementation of agent-based intrusion detection systems', Int.

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Section: Related Modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Software fault tree and coloured Petri net based specification, design and implementation of agent-based intrusion detection systems

Helmer¹,

Wong²,

Slagell³

et al. 2007

IJICS

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“…al. (1988)], Haystack Laboratories' HAYSTACK System [Smaha (1988)], Los Alamos National Laboratory's Wisdom & Sense (W&S) [Liepins & Vaccaro (1989)], AT&T's COMPUTERWATCH [Dowell & Ramstedt (1990)] and ASAX [Habra et. al.…”

Section: Prior Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Machine‐independent audit trail analysis—a tool for continuous audit assurance

Best

Mohay

Anderson

2004

Intelligent Systems in Accounting, Finance and Management

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This paper reports the results of a research project which examines the feasibility of developing a machine‐independent audit trail analyser (MIATA). MIATA is a knowledge‐based system which performs intelligent analysis of operating system audit trails. Such a system is proposed as a decision support tool for auditors when assessing the risk of unauthorized user activity in multi‐user computer systems. It is also relevant to the provision of a continuous assurance service to clients by internal and external auditors. Monitoring user activity in system audit trails manually is impractical because of the vast quantity of events recorded in those audit trails. However, if done manually, an expert security auditor would be needed to look for two main types of events—user activity rejected by the system's security settings (failed actions) and users behaving abnormally (e.g. unexpected changes in activity such as the purchasing clerk attempting to modify payroll data). A knowledge‐based system is suited to applications that require expertise to perform well‐deﬁned, yet complex, monitoring activities (e.g. controlling nuclear reactors and detecting intrusions in computer systems). To permit machine‐independent intelligent audit trail analysis, an anomaly‐detection approach is adopted. Time series forecasting methods are used to develop and maintain the user proﬁle database (knowledge base) that allows identiﬁcation of users with rejected behaviour as well as abnormal behaviour. The knowledge‐based system maintains this knowledge base and permits reporting on the potential intruder threats (summarized in Table I). The intelligence of the MIATA system is its ability to handle audit trails from any system, its knowledge base capturing rejected user activity and detecting anomalous activity, and its reporting capabilities focusing on known methods of intrusion. MIATA also updates user proﬁles and forecasts of behaviour on a daily basis. As such, it also ‘learns’ from changes in user behaviour. The feasibility of generating machine‐independent audit trail records, and the applicability of the anomaly‐detection approach and time series forecasting methods, are demonstrated using three case studies. These results support the proposal that developing a machine‐independent audit trail analyser is feasible. Such a system will be an invaluable aid to an auditor in detecting potential computer intrusions and monitoring user activity. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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“…The ASAX (Advanced Security and Audit Trail Analysis on UniX) project [11] uses a rule-based language called RUSSEL (Rule Based Sequence Evaluation Language), which provides a combination of procedural and rule-based programming to reason about activity on Unix systems by analyzing audit trails.…”

Section: P-best (Production-based Expert Systemmentioning

confidence: 99%

Using CLIPS to Detect Network Intrusions

Alípio

Carvalho

Neves

2003

Progress in Artificial Intelligence

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We describe how to build a network intrusion detection sensor by slightly modifying NASA's CLIPS source code introducing some new features. An overview of the system is presented emphasizing the strategies used to inter-operate between the packet capture engine written in C and CLIPS. Some extensions were developed in order to manipulate timestamps, multiple string pattern matching and certainty factors. Several Snort functions and plugins were adapted and used for packet decoding and preprocessing. A rule translator was also built to reuse most of the Snort's attack signatures. Despite some performance drawbacks, results prove that CLIPS can be used for real-time network intrusion detection under certain conditions. Several attack signatures using CLIPS rules are showed in the appendix. By mixing CLIPS with Snort features, it was possible to introduce flexibility and expressiveness to network intrusion detection.

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ASAX: Software architecture and rule-based language for universal audit trail analysis

Cited by 55 publications

References 3 publications

Software fault tree and coloured Petri net based specification, design and implementation of agent-based intrusion detection systems

Software fault tree and coloured Petri net based specification, design and implementation of agent-based intrusion detection systems

Machine‐independent audit trail analysis—a tool for continuous audit assurance

Using CLIPS to Detect Network Intrusions

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