Re: new on IDSs (Context-awareness in IDSes)

From: Umesh Shankar (ushankar@cs.berkeley.edu)
Date: 01/28/03

  • Next message: Kohlenberg, Toby: "RE: Active response... some thoughts."
    From: Umesh Shankar <ushankar@cs.berkeley.edu>
    To: focus-ids@securityfocus.com
    Date: 27 Jan 2003 16:00:26 -0800
    
    

    Hello all,

    I'm at student at UC Berkeley (my advisor is David Wagner). Vern Paxson
    and I have done work on gathering and using network- and host-specific
    information to disambiguate traffic, which we call "Active Mapping".
    This lets us perform a more precise analysis. We have a paper coming up
    at the IEEE Security (Oakland) conference. A not-quite-final version of
    it is available at

    http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/%7Eushankar/research/active/activemap.pdf

    Feel free to contact if you have any questions or would like to try it
    out.

    Umesh

    > Date: Mon, 27 Jan 2003 13:33:42 -0500
    > From: "David W. Goodrum" <dgoodrum@nfr.com>
    > Subject: Re: new on IDSs
    > To: Omar Herrera <oherrera@prodigy.net.mx>
    > Cc: focus-ids@securityfocus.com
    >
    > Actually Omar, NFR's NID engine performs passive OS fingerprinting. So,
    > we re-assemble fragments the same way as the destination OS, thus
    > avoiding that common problem among most other NIDS technologies.
    >
    > Omar Herrera wrote:
    > > Dear Vladimir,
    > >
    > > I believe that one of the biggest limitations of NIDS the need for
    > > response emulation capabilities. NIDS have to know how a particular O.S.
    > > responds to certain packets in order to act accordingly and avoid
    > > evasion and injection techniques; actually this need is not a limitation
    > > by itself but this capability is difficult to implement.
    > >
    > > Not only should they consider O.S. responses, in many cases they should
    > > also consider specific application responses (web servers for example).
    > > So, in a big company with a huge diversity of applications and
    > > configurations life won't be easy for a NIDS.
    > >
    > > I'm not sure of what investigation is taking place to reduce this other
    > > than adding a bunch of behavior signatures but I believe that for
    > > certain configurations things would be easier for a NIDS.
    > >
    > > For example, if the NIDS is in front of a firewall implementing
    > > application gateway and circuit gateway technologies, in theory, it
    > > would suffice to the NIDS to know exactly how this device handles
    > > traffic at different levels. I'm not aware of a product claiming to do
    > > this interaction with firewalls though (and you just can't have this
    > > configuration everywhere).
    > >
    > > Just some thoughts,
    > >
    > > Omar Herrera
    > >
    > >
    > >>hi all,
    > >>
    > >>I'm interested in NIDS and i was wondering if somebody could, please,
    > >>answer
    > >>these questions or give me some information (links, etc):
    > >>
    > >>1.- Which are NIDS limitations, in addition of pattern-matching
    > >
    > > inherent
    > >
    > >>limitations?
    > >>
    > >>2.- Wich technologies or investigation lines are trying to minimize or
    > >>even
    > >>correct this limitations?
    > >>
    > >>3.- What about distributed NIDS?
    > >>
    > >
    > >
    > >
    > > ---
    > > Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free.
    > > Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com).
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    > >
    > >
    >
    >
    > - --
    > David W. Goodrum
    > Senior Systems Engineer
    > NFR Security
    > Mobile: 703.731.3765
    > Office: 240.747.3425
    >
    >
    > ------- End of Forwarded Message
    >



    Relevant Pages

    • Re: Cracking Servers W/O open ports: Packet Filter Firewall
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    • RE: new on IDSs
      ... response emulation capabilities. ... NIDS have to know how a particular O.S. ... Not only should they consider O.S. responses, ... > 1.- Which are NIDS limitations, ...
      (Focus-IDS)
    • Re: new on IDSs
      ... Actually Omar, NFR's NID engine performs passive OS fingerprinting. ... avoiding that common problem among most other NIDS technologies. ... > I believe that one of the biggest limitations of NIDS the need for ... > certain configurations things would be easier for a NIDS. ...
      (Focus-IDS)

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