Watch Your Step! Detecting Stepping Stones in Programmable Networks

Abstract

Hackers hide behind compromised intermediate hosts and pose advanced persistent threats (APTs). The compromised hosts are used as stepping stones to launch real attacks, as is evident from an incident that shook the world in 2016 — Panama Papers Leak. The major attack would not go unnoticed if the compromised stepping stone, in this case an email server, could be identified in time. In this paper, we explore how today's programmable networks could be retrofitted with effective stepping stone detection mechanisms to correlate flows. We share initial results to prove that such a setup exists. Lastly, we analyze scalability issues associated with the setup and explore recent developments in network monitoring which have potential to address these issues.