Palantir: a framework for collaborative incident response and investigation

Abstract

Organizations owning cyber-infrastructure assets face large scale distributed attacks on a regular basis. In the face of increasing complexity and frequency of such attacks, we argue that it is insufficient to rely on organizational incident response teams or even trusted coordinating response teams. Instead, there is need to develop a framework that enables responders to establish trust and achieve an effective collaborative response and investigation process across multiple organizations and legal entities to track the adversary, eliminate the threat and pursue prosecution of the perpetrators. In this work we develop such a framework for effective collaboration. Our approach is motivated by our experiences in dealing with a large-scale distributed attack that took place in 2004 known as Incident 216. Based on our approach we present the Palantir system that comprises conceptual and technological capabilities to adequately respond to such attacks. To the best of our knowledge this is the first work proposing a system model and implementation for a collaborative multi-site incident response and investigation effort.