Biblio

Computer networks are overwhelmed by self propagating malware (worms, viruses, trojans). Although the number of security vulnerabilities grows every day, not the same thing can be said about the number of defense methods. But the most delicate problem in the information security domain remains detecting unknown attacks known as zero-day attacks. This paper presents methods for isolating the malicious traffic by using a honeypot system and analyzing it in order to automatically generate attack signatures for the Snort intrusion detection/prevention system. The honeypot is deployed as a virtual machine and its job is to log as much information as it can about the attacks. Then, using a protected machine, the logs are collected remotely, through a safe connection, for analysis. The challenge is to mitigate the risk we are exposed to and at the same time search for unknown attacks.

There is no doubt that security issues are on the rise and defense mechanisms are becoming one of the leading subjects for academic and industry experts. In this paper, we focus on the security domain and envision a new way of looking at the security life cycle. We utilize our vision to propose an asset-based approach to countermeasure zero day attacks. To evaluate our proposal, we built a prototype. The initial results are promising and indicate that our prototype will achieve its goal of detecting zero-day attacks.