Alarm clustering for intrusion detection systems in computer networks

Until recently, network administrators manually arranged alarms produced by intrusion detection systems (IDS) to attain a high-level description of cyberattacks. As the number of alarms is increasingly growing, automatic tools for alarm clustering have been proposed to provide such a high-level description of the attack scenarios. In addition, it has been shown that effective threat analysis requires the fusion of different sources of information, such as different IDS. This paper proposes a new strategy to perform alarm clustering which produces unified descriptions of attacks from alarms produced by multiple IDS. In order to be effective, the proposed alarm clustering system takes into account two characteristics of IDS: (i) for a given attack, different sensors may produce a number of alarms reporting different attack descriptions. and (ii) a certain attack description may be produced by the IDS in response to different types of attack. Experimental results show that the high-level alarms produced by the alarm clustering module effectively summarize the attacks, drastically reducing the volume of alarms presented to the administrator. In addition, these high-level alarms can be used as the base to perform further higher-level threat analysis. (C) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.