Network security risk analysis has received great attention within the scientific community, due to the current proliferation of network attacks and threats. Although, considerable effort has been placed on improving security best practices, insufficient effort has been expanded on seeking to understand the relationship between risk-related variables and objectives related to cost-effective network security decisions. This thesis seeks to improve the body of knowledge focusing on the trade-offs between financial costs and risk while analysing the impact an identified vulnerability may have on confidentiality, integrity and availability (CIA). Both security best practices and risk assessment methodologies have been extensively investigated to give a clear picture of the main limitations in the area of risk analysis. The work begins by analysing information visualisation techniques, which are used to build attack scenarios and identify additional threats and vulnerabilities. Special attention is paid to attack graphs, which have been used as a base to design a novel visualisation technique, referred to as an Onion Skin Layered Technique (OSLT), used to improve system knowledge as well as for threat identification. By analysing a list of threats and vulnerabilities during the first risk assessment stages, the work focuses on the development of a novel Risk Assessment and Optimisation Model (RAOM), which expands the knowledge of risk analysis by formulating a multi-objective optimisation problem, where objectives such as cost and risk are to be minimised. The optimisation routine is developed so as to accommodate conflicting objectives and to provide the human decision maker with an optimum solution set. The aim is to minimise the cost of security countermeasures without increasing the risk of a vulnerability being exploited by a threat and resulting in some impact on CIA. Due to the multi-objective nature of the problem a performance comparison between multi-objective Tabu Search (MOTS) Methods, Exhaustive Search and a multi-objective Genetic Algorithm (MOGA) has been also carried out. Finally, extensive experimentation has been carried out with both artificial and real world problem data (taken from the case study) to show that the method is capable of delivering solutions for real world problem data sets.

abstract: Cloud computing systems fundamentally provide access to large pools of data and computational resources through a variety of interfaces similar in spirit to existing grid and HPC resource management and programming systems. These types of systems offer a new programming target for scalable application developers and have gained popularity over the past few years. However, most cloud computing systems in operation today are proprietary and rely upon infrastructure that is invisible to the research community, or are not explicitly designed to be instrumented and modified by systems researchers. In this research, Xen Server Management API is employed to build a framework for cloud computing that implements what is commonly referred to as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS); systems that give users the ability to run and control entire virtual machine instances deployed across a variety physical resources. The goal of this research is to develop a cloud based resource and service sharing platform for Computer network security education a.k.a Virtual Lab. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.S. Computer Science 2010

Segurança de TI tornou-se nos últimos anos uma grande preocupação para empresas em geral. Entretanto, não é possível atingir níveis satisfatórios de segurança sem que estes venham acompanhados tanto de grandes investimentos para adquirir ferramentas que satisfaçam os requisitos de segurança quanto de procedimentos, em geral, complexos para instalar e manter a infra-estrutura protegida. A comunidade científica propôs, no passado recente, modelos e técnicas para medir a complexidade de procedimentos de configuração de TI, cientes de que eles são responsáveis por uma parcela significativa do custo operacional, freqüentemente dominando o total cost of ownership. No entanto, apesar do papel central de segurança neste contexto, ela não foi objeto de investigação até então. Para abordar este problema, neste trabalho aplica-se um modelo de complexidade proposto na literatura para mensurar o impacto de segurança na complexidade de procedimentos de TI. A proposta deste trabalho foi materializada através da implementação de um protótipo para análise de complexidade chamado Security Complexity Analyzer (SCA). Como prova de conceito e viabilidade de nossa proposta, o SCA foi utilizado para avaliar a complexidade de cenários reais de segurança. Além disso, foi conduzido um estudo para investigar a relação entre as métricas propostas no modelo de complexidade e o tempo gasto pelo administrador durante a execução dos procedimentos de segurança, através de um modelo quantitativo baseado em regressão linear, com o objetivo de prever custos associados à segurança. / IT security has become over the recent years a major concern for organizations. However, it doest not come without large investments on both the acquisition of tools to satisfy particular security requirements and complex procedures to deploy and maintain a protected infrastructure. The scientific community has proposed in the recent past models and techniques to estimate the complexity of configuration procedures, aware that they represent a significant operational cost, often dominating total cost of ownership. However, despite the central role played by security within this context, it has not been subject to any investigation to date. To address this issue, we apply a model of configuration complexity proposed in the literature in order to be able to estimate security impact on the complexity of IT procedures. Our proposal has been materialized through a prototypical implementation of a complexity scorer system called Security Complexity Analyzer (SCA). To prove concept and technical feasibility of our proposal, we have used SCA to evaluate real-life security scenarios. In addition, we have conducted a study in order to investigate the relation between the metrics proposed in the model and the time spent by the administrator while executing security procedures, with a quantitative model built using multiple regression analysis, in order to predict the costs associated to security.

Segurança de TI tornou-se nos últimos anos uma grande preocupação para empresas em geral. Entretanto, não é possível atingir níveis satisfatórios de segurança sem que estes venham acompanhados tanto de grandes investimentos para adquirir ferramentas que satisfaçam os requisitos de segurança quanto de procedimentos, em geral, complexos para instalar e manter a infra-estrutura protegida. A comunidade científica propôs, no passado recente, modelos e técnicas para medir a complexidade de procedimentos de configuração de TI, cientes de que eles são responsáveis por uma parcela significativa do custo operacional, freqüentemente dominando o total cost of ownership. No entanto, apesar do papel central de segurança neste contexto, ela não foi objeto de investigação até então. Para abordar este problema, neste trabalho aplica-se um modelo de complexidade proposto na literatura para mensurar o impacto de segurança na complexidade de procedimentos de TI. A proposta deste trabalho foi materializada através da implementação de um protótipo para análise de complexidade chamado Security Complexity Analyzer (SCA). Como prova de conceito e viabilidade de nossa proposta, o SCA foi utilizado para avaliar a complexidade de cenários reais de segurança. Além disso, foi conduzido um estudo para investigar a relação entre as métricas propostas no modelo de complexidade e o tempo gasto pelo administrador durante a execução dos procedimentos de segurança, através de um modelo quantitativo baseado em regressão linear, com o objetivo de prever custos associados à segurança. / IT security has become over the recent years a major concern for organizations. However, it doest not come without large investments on both the acquisition of tools to satisfy particular security requirements and complex procedures to deploy and maintain a protected infrastructure. The scientific community has proposed in the recent past models and techniques to estimate the complexity of configuration procedures, aware that they represent a significant operational cost, often dominating total cost of ownership. However, despite the central role played by security within this context, it has not been subject to any investigation to date. To address this issue, we apply a model of configuration complexity proposed in the literature in order to be able to estimate security impact on the complexity of IT procedures. Our proposal has been materialized through a prototypical implementation of a complexity scorer system called Security Complexity Analyzer (SCA). To prove concept and technical feasibility of our proposal, we have used SCA to evaluate real-life security scenarios. In addition, we have conducted a study in order to investigate the relation between the metrics proposed in the model and the time spent by the administrator while executing security procedures, with a quantitative model built using multiple regression analysis, in order to predict the costs associated to security.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:29:40Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2011-08-01Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T18:59:20Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 proto_a_me_sjrp.pdf: 1013912 bytes, checksum: 6c409f2d9d7693eb241046a3ee776c64 (MD5) / Este trabalho desenvolve e consolida um sistema de identificação e correlação de comportamentos de usuários e serviços em redes de computadores. A definição destes perfis auxiliará a identificação de comportamentos anômalos ao perfil de um grupo de usuários e serviços e a detecção de ataques em redes de computadores. Este sistema possui como estrutura base a utilização do padrão IPFIX – IP Flow Information Export – como exportador de informações sumarizadas de uma rede de computadores. O projeto prevê duas etapas principais: o desenvolvimento de um coletor de fluxos baseado no protocolo NetFlow, formalizado pela Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) como padrão IPFIX, que acrescente melhorias na sumarização das informações oferecidas, consumindo menor espaço de armazenamento; a utilização de técnicas de mineração de dados estatísticas e associativas para detecção, correlação e classificação de comportamentos e eventos em redes de computadores. Este modelo de sistema mostra-se inovador na análise de fluxos de rede por meio da mineração de dados, empreendendo características importantes aos sistemas de monitoramento e segurança computacional, como escalabilidade de redes de alta velocidade e a detecção rápida de atividades ilícitas, varreduras de rede, intrusão, ataques de negação de serviço e de força bruta, sendo tais eventos considerados como grandes ameaças na Internet. Além disso, possibilita aos administradores de redes um melhor conhecimento do perfil da rede administrada / This work develops and consolidates an identification and correlation system of users and services behaviors on computer networks. The definition about these profiles assists in identifying anomalous behavior for the users and services profile and detecting attacks on computer networks. This system is based on the use of standard IPFIX – IP Flow Information Export – as a summarizing information exporter of a computer network. The project provides two main steps: the development of a flow collector based on the NetFlow protocol, formalized by Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as IPFIX standard, which improves the summarization of provided information, resulting in less storage space; the use of data mining association techniques for the detection, correlation and classification of behaviors and events in computer networks. This system model innovates in the analysis through IPFIX flow mining, adding important features to the monitoring of systems and computer security, such as scalability for high speed networks and fast detection of illicit activities, network scan, intrusion, DoS and brute force attacks, which are events considered big threats on the Internet. Also, it enables network administrators to have a better profile of the managed network

Segurança de TI tornou-se nos últimos anos uma grande preocupação para empresas em geral. Entretanto, não é possível atingir níveis satisfatórios de segurança sem que estes venham acompanhados tanto de grandes investimentos para adquirir ferramentas que satisfaçam os requisitos de segurança quanto de procedimentos, em geral, complexos para instalar e manter a infra-estrutura protegida. A comunidade científica propôs, no passado recente, modelos e técnicas para medir a complexidade de procedimentos de configuração de TI, cientes de que eles são responsáveis por uma parcela significativa do custo operacional, freqüentemente dominando o total cost of ownership. No entanto, apesar do papel central de segurança neste contexto, ela não foi objeto de investigação até então. Para abordar este problema, neste trabalho aplica-se um modelo de complexidade proposto na literatura para mensurar o impacto de segurança na complexidade de procedimentos de TI. A proposta deste trabalho foi materializada através da implementação de um protótipo para análise de complexidade chamado Security Complexity Analyzer (SCA). Como prova de conceito e viabilidade de nossa proposta, o SCA foi utilizado para avaliar a complexidade de cenários reais de segurança. Além disso, foi conduzido um estudo para investigar a relação entre as métricas propostas no modelo de complexidade e o tempo gasto pelo administrador durante a execução dos procedimentos de segurança, através de um modelo quantitativo baseado em regressão linear, com o objetivo de prever custos associados à segurança. / IT security has become over the recent years a major concern for organizations. However, it doest not come without large investments on both the acquisition of tools to satisfy particular security requirements and complex procedures to deploy and maintain a protected infrastructure. The scientific community has proposed in the recent past models and techniques to estimate the complexity of configuration procedures, aware that they represent a significant operational cost, often dominating total cost of ownership. However, despite the central role played by security within this context, it has not been subject to any investigation to date. To address this issue, we apply a model of configuration complexity proposed in the literature in order to be able to estimate security impact on the complexity of IT procedures. Our proposal has been materialized through a prototypical implementation of a complexity scorer system called Security Complexity Analyzer (SCA). To prove concept and technical feasibility of our proposal, we have used SCA to evaluate real-life security scenarios. In addition, we have conducted a study in order to investigate the relation between the metrics proposed in the model and the time spent by the administrator while executing security procedures, with a quantitative model built using multiple regression analysis, in order to predict the costs associated to security.

Increasing numbers of alerts produced by network intrusion detection systems (NIDS) have burdened the job of security analysts especially in identifying and responding to them. The tasks of exploring and analysing large quantities of communication network security data are also difficult. This thesis studied the application of visualisation in combination with alerts classifier to make the exploring and understanding of network security alerts data faster and easier. The prototype software, NSAViz, has been developed to visualise and to provide an intuitive presentation of the network security alerts data using interactive 3D visuals with an integration of a false alert classifier. The needs analysis of this prototype was based on the suggested needs of network security analyst's tasks as seen in the literatures. The prototype software incorporates various projections of the alert data in 3D displays. The overview was plotted in a 3D plot named as "time series 3D AlertGraph" which was an extension of the 2D histographs into 3D. The 3D AlertGraph was effectively summarised the alerts data and gave the overview of the network security status. Filtering, drill-down and playback of the alerts at variable speed were incorporated to strengthen the analysis. Real-time visual observation was also included. To identify true alerts from all alerts represents the main task of the network security analyst. This prototype software was integrated with a false alert classifier using a classification tree based on C4.5 classification algorithm to classify the alerts into true and false. Users can add new samples and edit the existing classifier training sample. The classifier performance was measured using k-fold cross-validation technique. The results showed the classifier was able to remove noise in the visualisation, thus making the pattern of the true alerts to emerge. It also highlighted the true alerts in the visualisation. Finally, a user evaluation was conducted to find the usability problems in the tool and to measure its effectiveness. The feed backs showed the tools had successfully helped the task of the security analyst and increased the security awareness in their supervised network. From this research, the task of exploring and analysing a large amount of network security data becomes easier and the true attacks can be identified using the prototype visualisation tools. Visualisation techniques and false alert classification are helpful in exploring and analysing network security data.

Orientador: Adriano Mauro Cansian / Banca: Paulo Licio de Geus / Banca: Marcos Antônio Cavenaghi / Resumo: Este trabalho desenvolve e consolida um sistema de identificação e correlação de comportamentos de usuários e serviços em redes de computadores. A definição destes perfis auxiliará a identificação de comportamentos anômalos ao perfil de um grupo de usuários e serviços e a detecção de ataques em redes de computadores. Este sistema possui como estrutura base a utilização do padrão IPFIX - IP Flow Information Export - como exportador de informações sumarizadas de uma rede de computadores. O projeto prevê duas etapas principais: o desenvolvimento de um coletor de fluxos baseado no protocolo NetFlow, formalizado pela Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) como padrão IPFIX, que acrescente melhorias na sumarização das informações oferecidas, consumindo menor espaço de armazenamento; a utilização de técnicas de mineração de dados estatísticas e associativas para detecção, correlação e classificação de comportamentos e eventos em redes de computadores. Este modelo de sistema mostra-se inovador na análise de fluxos de rede por meio da mineração de dados, empreendendo características importantes aos sistemas de monitoramento e segurança computacional, como escalabilidade de redes de alta velocidade e a detecção rápida de atividades ilícitas, varreduras de rede, intrusão, ataques de negação de serviço e de força bruta, sendo tais eventos considerados como grandes ameaças na Internet. Além disso, possibilita aos administradores de redes um melhor conhecimento do perfil da rede administrada / Abstract: This work develops and consolidates an identification and correlation system of users and services behaviors on computer networks. The definition about these profiles assists in identifying anomalous behavior for the users and services profile and detecting attacks on computer networks. This system is based on the use of standard IPFIX - IP Flow Information Export - as a summarizing information exporter of a computer network. The project provides two main steps: the development of a flow collector based on the NetFlow protocol, formalized by Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as IPFIX standard, which improves the summarization of provided information, resulting in less storage space; the use of data mining association techniques for the detection, correlation and classification of behaviors and events in computer networks. This system model innovates in the analysis through IPFIX flow mining, adding important features to the monitoring of systems and computer security, such as scalability for high speed networks and fast detection of illicit activities, network scan, intrusion, DoS and brute force attacks, which are events considered big threats on the Internet. Also, it enables network administrators to have a better profile of the managed network / Mestre