Date of Award

9-1-2011

Document Type

Thesis (Ph.D.)

Department or Program

Department of Computer Science

First Advisor

Amit Chakrabarti

Abstract

Anomaly detection in computer networks yields valuable information on events relating to the components of a network, their states, the users in a network and their activities. This thesis provides a unified distribution-based methodology for online detection of anomalies in network traffic streams. The methodology is distribution-based in that it regards the traffic stream as a time series of distributions (histograms), and monitors metrics of distributions in the time series. The effectiveness of the methodology is demonstrated in three application scenarios. First, in 802.11 wireless traffic, we show the ability to detect certain classes of attacks using the methodology. Second, in information network update streams (specifically in Wikipedia) we show the ability to detect the activity of bots, flash events, and outages, as they occur. Third, in Voice over IP traffic streams, we show the ability to detect covert channels that exfiltrate confidential information out of the network. Our experiments show the high detection rate of the methodology when compared to other existing methods, while maintaining a low rate of false positives. Furthermore, we provide algorithmic results that enable efficient and scalable implementation of the above methodology, to accomodate the massive data rates observed in modern infomation streams on the Internet. Through these applications, we present an extensive study of several aspects of the methodology. We analyze the behavior of metrics we consider, providing justification of our choice of those metrics, and how they can be used to diagnose anomalies. We provide insight into the choice of parameters, like window length and threshold, used in anomaly detection.

Comments

Originally posted in the Dartmouth College Computer Science Technical Report Series, number TR2011-707.

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