Collaborative Post-IDS Alert Analysis Based on Network Management Techniques

Abstract

These days, IDS has been widely deployed and is beginning to gain acceptance as a worthwhile investment. However, at least three disadvantages, which are very high alert rate, fairly high false positives and quite limited ability for detecting distributed and collaborative attacks, hinder its further development. In order to overcome these weaknesses and resolve the conflict with current network security requirements as well, researches on post-IDS alert analysis become a focus, while more and more researchers and engineers advocate two techniques named collaboration and correlation. The aim of this paper is then to propose application of XML-based integrated network management techniques to support collaboration for the purpose of post-IDS alert analysis, and discuss corresponding issues about unified representation of information and knowledge. Validation results show that, proposed approach is quite effective in reducing the rate of false positives.