Check out the new USENIX Web site.

USENIX Home . About USENIX . Events . membership . Publications . Students
14th USENIX Security Symposium — Abstract

Pp. 97–112 of the Proceedings

An Architecture for Generating Semantics-Aware Signatures

Vinod Yegneswaran, Jonathon T. Giffin, Paul Barford, Somesh Jha, Computer Sciences Department University of Wisconsin, Madison

Abstract

dentifying new intrusions and developing effective signatures that detect them is essential for protecting computer networks. We present Nemean, a system for automatic generation of intrusion signatures from honeynet packet traces. Our architecture is distinguished by its emphasis on a modular design framework that encourages independent development and modification of system components and protocol semantics awareness which allows for construction of signatures that greatly reduce false alarms. The building blocks of our architecture include transport and service normalization, intrusion profile clustering and automata learning that generates connection and session aware signatures. We demonstrate the potential of Nemean's semantics-aware, resilient signatures through a prototype implementation. We use two datasets to evaluate the system: (i) a production dataset for false-alarm evaluation and (ii) a honeynet dataset for measuring detection rates. Signatures generated by Nemean for NetBIOS exploits had a 0% false-positive rate and a 0.04% false-negative rate.
  • View the full text of this paper in HTML and PDF.
    Click here if you have forgotten your password Until August 2006, you will need your USENIX membership identification in order to access the full papers. The Proceedings are published as a collective work, © 2005 by the USENIX Association. All Rights Reserved. Rights to individual papers remain with the author or the author's employer. Permission is granted for the noncommercial reproduction of the complete work for educational or research purposes. USENIX acknowledges all trademarks within this paper.

  • If you need the latest Adobe Acrobat Reader, you can download it from Adobe's site.
To become a USENIX Member, please see our Membership Information.

?Need help? Use our Contacts page.

Last changed: 3 Aug. 2005 ch
Technical Program
Security '05 Home
USENIX home