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lstm-rnn-correlation

An application of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) for learning a mapping function, mapping strings into a small, fixed-size abstract feature space. Existing clustering algorithms can then be applied to cluster samples. The key contribution is that the mapping function is learned from labelled text samples, such that no feature engineering or domain expertise is required.

We have applied this method to Intrusion Detection (IDS) alerts, demonstrating that application of the method can reduce the manual workload in a Security Operations Center (SOC) roughly one order of magitude, with hardly any increased risk over overlooking an incident 1.

Reuse

We strongly encourage reproduction of our results, modifications to the method and the like, hence we have release this, our own prototype, under LGPL3.

If reusing this for scientific work, or in anything else that is published, we kindly request that a reference is made to our paper presenting the method and the above application 1. We will also be very happy to know about such work, so a notification via email or a PR with a reference will also be appriciated.

Installation and use

We have developped this on python 2.7 (Attempting to be 3.0 compatible, but testing is required) on Debian based Linux distributions (Linux mint 17, Linux Mint 18, Ubuntu 14.04 Server, etc). We encourage such an environment for your first installation. Furthermore we have used and encourage the use of virtualenv, for isolation and the ability to easily roll back.

virtualenv --system-site-packages -p python2.7 env

Dependencies are installed with:

pip install --upgrade setuptools pip # Old version of pip causes errors
pip install -r requirements.txt

Jupyter, is used for development and small test runs:

jupyter notebook

For running the full loads, notebooks (*.ipynb) are converted to python scripts (*.py):

jupyter nbconvert --to=script *.ipynb

For ideas on how to run the resulting python script on suitable platforms, we refer to our scripts for the same:

  • setup-for-cuda-on-aws.sh: Dependency installation on Amazon Web Services (AWS) instances. Go for GPU.
  • slurm-job.sl: Used for starting jobs on the Abacus 2.0 compute cluster2, managed through slurm.

Workflow

We have used the following workflow:

  1. Prepare data sets. Refer to folders preprocessing/{mcfp_recorded_merge}/ and the below description of data sets.
  2. Train, validate and test the method. Refer to lstm-rnn-tied-weights.ipynb
  3. Compute and format results for presentation. Refer to results.ipynb.

Data sets

The data sets used in our work with this approach are the following:

Malware Capture Facility merged with private benign traffic

  1. Retrieve data. Refer to preprocessing/mcfp_recorded_merge/data_cfg.py for public data on bot malware activity (Note: We downloaded pcaps and applied the Snort IDS as per 1).
  2. Record private traffic, validate absence of malicious activity, apply the Snort IDS, as per 1.
  3. Clean up data and merge into a single set. Refer to preprocessing/mcfp_recorded_merge/preprocessing.ipynb.

CIC-IDS-2017

Homepage for the data set: http://www.unb.ca/cic/datasets/ids-2017.html. Private links/credentials to the data have been provided to us uppon request by e-mail.

IMPORTANT - Data inconsistency: We observed a noteable inconsistency between the data description on the homepage and the labels of the flows: Friday-WorkingHours-Morning.pcap_ISCX.csv contains flows labelled as botnet and timestamped from ~10:00 a.m. to ~1:00 p.m., while the description states the botnet was active from 10:02 a.m. – 11:02 a.m.. See clean-flows.ipynb for details

  1. Run pcaps through snort, concatenate the log files.
  2. Label alerts according to incident descriptions (preprocessing/cic-ids-2017/incident_descriptions.csv).
    • A description consists of an label (incident), the attacker and victim IP, and a time interval.
    • Each alert gets the label from the description where it falls within the time interval and at least one IP in the alert (src or dst) matches one IP in the description, not considering the routers internal and external IPs (This is to avoid effects of NAT).
    • All alerts not matching a description defaults to benign.
  3. Stratify such that no label occurs more than 200 times, and drop benign to match the total size of the MCFP dataset.

References

Footnotes

  1. Egon Kidmose, Matija Stevanovic, Søren Brandbyge and Jens M. Pedersen, Automating the discovery of correlated and false intrusion alerts by using neural networks. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  2. https://abacus.deic.dk/ ↩