Modeling NIDS evasion with genetic programming

Proceeding of: 9th International Conference on Security and Management (SAM 2010). Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, July 12-15 2010Nowadays, Network Intrusion Detection Systems are quickly updated in order to prevent systems against new attacks. This situation has provoked that attackers focus their efforts on new sophisticated evasive techniques when trying to attack a system. Unfortunately, most of these techniques are based on network protocols ambiguities [1], so NIDS designers must take them into account when updating their tools. In this paper, we present a new approach to improve the task of looking for new evasive techniques. The core of our work is to model existing NIDS using the Genetic Pro- gramming paradigm. Thus, we obtain models that simulate the behavior of NIDS with great precision, but with a much simpler semantics than the one of the NIDS. Looking for this easier semantics allows us to easily construct evasions on the model, and therefore on the NIDS, as their behavior is quite similar. Our results show how precisely GP can model a NIDS behavior.Publicad

A functional framework to evade network IDS

Proceeding of: 44th Hawaii International Conference on System Science, Kauai, HI, January 4-7, 2011Signature based Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) apply a set of rules to identify hostile traffic in network segments. Currently they are so effective detecting known attacks that hackers seek new techniques to go unnoticed. Some of these techniques consist of exploiting network protocols ambiguities. Nowadays NIDS are prepared against most of these evasive techniques, as they are recognized and sorted out. The emergence of new evasive forms may cause NIDS to fail. In this paper we present an innovative functional framework to evade NIDS. Primary, NIDS are modeled accurately by means of Genetic Programming (GP). Then, we show that looking for evasions on models is simpler than directly trying to understand the behavior of NIDS. We present a proof of concept showing how to evade a self-built NIDS regarding two publicly available datasets. Our framework can be used to audit NIDS.This work was partially supported by CDTI, Ministerio de Industria, Turismo y Comercio of Spain in collaboration with Telefonica I+D, Project SEGUR@ CENIT-2007 2004.Publicad

Network intrusion detection using genetic programming.

Masters Degree. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg.Network intrusion detection is a real-world problem that involves detecting intrusions on a computer network. Detecting whether a network connection is intrusive or non-intrusive is essentially a binary classification problem. However, the type of intrusive connections can be categorised into a number of network attack classes and the task of associating an intrusion to a particular network type is multiclass classification. A number of artificial intelligence techniques have been used for network intrusion detection including Evolutionary Algorithms. This thesis investigates the application of evolutionary algorithms namely, Genetic Programming (GP), Grammatical Evolution (GE) and Multi-Expression Programming (MEP) in the network intrusion detection domain. Grammatical evolution and multi-expression programming are considered to be variants of GP. In this thesis, a comparison of the effectiveness of classifiers evolved by the three EAs within the network intrusion detection domain is performed. The comparison is performed on the publicly available KDD99 dataset. Furthermore, the effectiveness of a number of fitness functions is evaluated. From the results obtained, standard genetic programming performs better than grammatical evolution and multi-expression programming. The findings indicate that binary classifiers evolved using standard genetic programming outperformed classifiers evolved using grammatical evolution and multi-expression programming. For evolving multiclass classifiers different fitness functions used produced classifiers with different characteristics resulting in some classifiers achieving higher detection rates for specific network intrusion attacks as compared to other intrusion attacks. The findings indicate that classifiers evolved using multi-expression programming and genetic programming achieved high detection rates as compared to classifiers evolved using grammatical evolution