The Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS)

The Center for Education and Research in
Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS)

Reports and Papers Archive


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Internet & Web Law 1996

William J. Cook
Added 2016-12-01



Distributed Intrusion Detection System (DIDS) User Manual

Trident Data Systems
Added 2016-11-29



Firewalls & Internet Security Conference

National Computer Security Association
Added 2016-11-29


Report to the President June 2005: Computational Science: Ensuring America's Competitiveness

President's Information Technology Advisory Commitee
Added 2016-11-29

Analyzing Computer Intrusions

Andrew H. Gross
Added 2016-11-29

Computer Viruses

David J. Stang
Added 2016-11-11

E-lection 2004 Is e-voting ready for prime time?

John Marshall Law School
Added 2016-11-11

Spyder

Trident Data Systems
Added 2016-11-11

Computational Environment for Modeling and Analysing Network Traffic Behaviour using the Divide and Recombine Framework

CERIAS TR 2016-6
Ashrith Barthur
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There are two essential goals of this research. The first goal is to design and construct a computational environment that is used for studying large and complex datasets in the cybersecurity domain. The second goal is to analyse the Spamhaus blacklist query dataset which includes uncovering the properties of blacklisted hosts and understanding the nature of blacklisted hosts over time. The analytical environment enables deep analysis of very large and complex datasets by exploiting the divide and recombine framework. The capability to analyse data in depth enables one to go beyond just summary statistics in research. This deep analysis is at the highest level of granularity without any compromise on the size of the data. The environment is also, fully capable of processing the raw data into a data structure suited for analysis. Spamhaus is an organisation that identifies malicious hosts on the Internet. Information about malicious hosts are stored in a distributed database by Spamhaus and served through the DNS protocol query-response. Spamhaus and other malicious-host-blacklisting organisations have replaced smaller malicious host databases curated independently by multiple organisations for their internal needs. Spamhaus services are popular due to their free access, exhaustive information, historical information, simple DNS based implementation, and reliability. The malicious host information obtained from these databases are used in the first step of weeding out potentially harmful hosts on the internet. During the course of this research work a detailed packet-level analysis was carried out on the Spamhaus blacklist data. It was observed that the query-responses displayed some peculiar behaviours. These anomalies were studied and modeled, and identified to be showing definite patterns. These patterns are empirical proof of a systemic or statistical phenomenon.

Added 2016-10-17