ChinaCom2008-Network and Information Security Symposium

Research Article

Generating Network Attack Graphs for Security Alert Correlation

  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.1109/CHINACOM.2008.4685009,
        author={Shaojun Zhang and Jianhua Li and Xiuzhen Chen and Lei Fan},
        title={Generating Network Attack Graphs for Security Alert Correlation},
        proceedings={ChinaCom2008-Network and Information Security Symposium},
        publisher={IEEE},
        proceedings_a={CHINACOM2008-NIS},
        year={2008},
        month={11},
        keywords={network security attack graph alert correlation},
        doi={10.1109/CHINACOM.2008.4685009}
    }
    
  • Shaojun Zhang
    Jianhua Li
    Xiuzhen Chen
    Lei Fan
    Year: 2008
    Generating Network Attack Graphs for Security Alert Correlation
    CHINACOM2008-NIS
    IEEE
    DOI: 10.1109/CHINACOM.2008.4685009
Shaojun Zhang1,*, Jianhua Li1,*, Xiuzhen Chen1,*, Lei Fan1,*
  • 1: School of Information Security Engineering Shanghai Jiaotong University Shanghai, China
*Contact email: zshaojun@sjtu.edu.cn, lijh888@sjtu.edu.cn, chenxz@sjtu.edu.cn, fanlei@sjtu.edu.cn

Abstract

Most network administrators have got the unpleasant experience of being overwhelmed by tremendous unstructured network security alerts produced by heterogeneous network devices. To date, various approaches have been proposed to correlate security alerts, including the adoption of network attack graphs to clarify their causal relationship. However, there still lacks an operational method to generate attack graphs tailored for alert correlation, especially in large scale network environments. In this paper, we propose a kind of attack graph which can be built in polynomial time using an intuitive object-oriented method. Based on the graph, a criterion is given out to correlate security alerts into scenarios. As practice, a prototype system is implemented to testify the feasibility of the approaches.