Autograph swMATH ID: 23929 Software Authors: Kim, H.A., Karp, B. Description: Autograph: toward automated, distributed worm signature detection. Today’s Internet intrusion detection systems (IDSes) monitor edge networks’ DMZs to identify and/or filter malicious flows. While an IDS helps protect the hosts on its local edge network from compromise and denial of service, it cannot alone effectively intervene to halt and reverse the spreading of novel Internet worms. Generation of the worm signatures required by an IDS–the byte patterns sought in monitored traffic to identify worms–today entails non-trivial human labor, and thus significant delay: as network operators detect anomalous behavior, they communicate with one another and manually study packet traces to produce a worm signature. Yet intervention must occur early in an epidemic to halt a worm’s spread. Autograph is a system that automatically generates signatures for novel Internet worms that propagate using TCP transport. It does so by by analyzing the prevalence of portions of flow payloads, and thus uses no knowledge of protocol semantics above the TCP level. It is designed to produce signatures that exhibit high sensitivity (high true positives) and high specificity (low false positives); our evaluation of the system on real DMZ traces validates that it achieves these goals. Autograph also shares port scan reports among distributed monitor instances; using trace-driven simulation of a worm outbreak, we’ve demonstrated the value of this technique in speeding the generation of signatures for novel worms. Our results elucidate the fundamental trade-off between early generation of signatures for novel worms and the specificity of these generated signatures. Homepage: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~hakim/autograph/ Related Software: Polygraph; Snort; Hamsa; BLINC; Panorama; KEA; FIRMA; VAMO; ExecScent; BitShred; PhishEye; BotProfiler; BotTokenizer; BotMiner; BotSniffer; longmemo; Lua; Matlab; Valgrind; TCPDUMP Cited in: 4 Publications all top 5 Cited by 17 Authors 1 Barreno, Marco 1 Jiang, Jianguo 1 Joseph, Anthony D. 1 Kencl, Lukas 1 Keromytis, Angelos D. 1 Locasto, Michael E. 1 Loebl, Martin 1 Nelson, Blaine 1 Qi, Biao 1 Shi, Zhixin 1 Song, Yingbo 1 Stavrou, Angelos 1 Stolfo, Salvatore J. 1 Tygar, J. D. 1 Wang, Jizhi 1 Wang, Qiwen 1 Wang, Yan Cited in 2 Serials 2 Machine Learning 1 Computer Science Review Cited in 3 Fields 3 Computer science (68-XX) 1 Biology and other natural sciences (92-XX) 1 Information and communication theory, circuits (94-XX) Citations by Year