SAIBERSOC : A Methodology and Tool for Experimenting with Security Operation Centers

Abstract

In this paper we introduce SAIBERSOC ( S ynthetic A ttack I njection to B enchmark and E valuate the P er formance of S ecurity O peration C enters), a tool and methodology enabling security researchers and operators to evaluate the performance of deployed and operational Security Operation Centers (SOCs) (or any other security monitoring infrastructure). The methodology relies on the MITRE ATT&CK Framework to define a procedure to generate and automatically inject synthetic attacks in an operational SOC to evaluate any output metric of interest (e.g., detection accuracy, time-to-investigation, etc.). To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology, we devise an experiment with n=124 students playing the role of SOC analysts. The experiment relies on a real SOC infrastructure and assigns students to either a BADSOC or a GOODSOC experimental condition. Our results show that the proposed methodology is effective in identifying variations in SOC performance caused by (minimal) changes in SOC configuration. We release the SAIBERSOC tool implementation as free and open source software.

Building a Scalable Security Operations Center: A Focus on Open-source Tools

“…4, this architecture is wellrounded. It incorporates log monitoring, threat intelligence, asset inventory, configuration assessment, compliance monitoring, and automated incident response to detect and respond to security issues [15][16][17][18][19].…”