Cross-feature analysis for detecting ad-hoc routing anomalies
With the proliferation of wireless devices, mobile ad-hoc networking (MANET) has become a very exciting and important technology. However, MANET is more vulnerable than wired networking. Existing security mechanisms designed for wired networks have to be redesigned in this new environment. In this paper, we discuss the problem of intrusion detection in MANET. The focus of our research is on techniques for automatically constructing anomaly detection models that are capable of detecting new (or unseen) attacks. We introduce a new data mining method that performs "cross-feature analysis" to capture the inter-feature correlation patterns in normal traffic. These patterns can be used as normal profiles to detect deviation (or anomalies) caused by attacks. We have implemented our method on a few well known ad-hoc routing protocols, namely, Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) and Ad-hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV), and have conducted extensive experiments on the ns-2 simulator. The results show that the anomaly detection models automatically computed using our data mining method can effectively, detect anomalies caused by typical routing intrusions.

title: Using Labeling to Prevent Cross-Service Attacks Against Smart Phones
abstract: Wireless devices that integrate the functionality of PDAs and cell phones are becoming commonplace, making different types of network services available to mobile applications. However, the integration of different services allows an attacker to cross service boundaries. For example, an attack carried out through the wireless network interface may eventually provide access to the phone functionality. This type of attacks can cause considerable damage because some of the services (e.g., the GSM-based services) charge the user based on the traffic or time of use. In this paper, we demonstrate the feasibility of these attacks by developing a proof-of-concept exploit that crosses service boundaries. To address these security issues, we developed a solution based on resource labeling. We modified the kernel of an integrated wireless device so that processes and files are marked in a way that allows one to regulate the access to different system resources. Labels are set when certain network services are accessed. The labeling is then transferred between processes and system resources as a result of either access or execution. We also defined a language for creating labeling rules, and demonstrated how the system can be used to prevent attacks that attempt to cross service boundaries. Experimental evaluation shows that the implementation introduces little overhead. Our security solution is orthogonal to other protection schemes and provides a critical defense for the growing problem of cell phone viruses and worms

title: Worm detection, early warning and response based on local victim information
abstract: Worm detection systems have traditionally focused on global strategies. In the absence of a global worm detection system, we examine the effectiveness of local worm detection and response strategies. This paper makes three contributions: (1) we propose a simple two-phase local worm victim detection algorithm, DSC (Destination-Source Correlation), based on worm behavior in terms of both infection pattern and scanning pattern. DSC can detect zero-day scanning worms with a high detection rate and very low false positive rate. (2) We demonstrate the effectiveness of early worm warning based on local victim information. For example, warning occurs with 0.19% infection of all vulnerable hosts on Internet when using a /12 monitored network. (3) Based on local victim information, we investigate and evaluate the effectiveness of an automatic real-time local response in terms of slowing down the global Internet worms propagation. (2) and (3) are general results, not specific to certain detection algorithm like DSC. We demonstrate (2) and (3) with both analytical models and packet-level network simulator experiments.

title: A framework for constructing features and models for intrusion detection systems
abstract: Intrusion detection (ID) is an important component of infrastructure protection mechanisms. Intrusion detection systems (IDSs) need to be accurate, adaptive, and extensible. Given these requirements and the complexities of today's network environments, we need a more systematic and automated IDS development process rather that the pure knowledge encoding and engineering approaches. This article describes a novel framework, MADAM ID, for Mining Audit Data for Automated Models for Instrusion Detection. This framework uses data mining algorithms to compute activity patterns from system audit data and extracts predictive features from the patterns. It then applies machine learning algorithms to the audit records taht are processed according to the feature definitions to generate intrusion detection rules.  Evaluation showed that our ID model was one of the best performing of all the participating systems. We also briefly discuss our experience in converting the detection models produced by off-line data mining programs to real-time modules of existing IDSs.

title: Statistical Causality Analysis of INFOSEC Alert Data
abstract: With the increasingly widespread deployment of security mechanisms, such as firewalls, intrusion detection systems (IDSs), antiviras software and authentication services, the problem of alert analysis has become very important. The large amount of alerts can overwhelm security administrators and prevent them from adequately understanding and analyzing the security state of the network, and initiating appropriate response in a timely fashion. Recently, several approaches for alert correlation and attack scenario analysis have been proposed. However, these approaches all have limited capabilities in detecting new attack scenarios. In this paper, we study the problem of security alert correlation with an emphasis on attack scenario analysis. In our framework, we use clustering techniques to process low-level alert data into high-level aggregated alerts, and conduct causal analysis based on statistical tests to discover new relationships among attacks. Our statistical causality approach complements other approaches that use hard-coded prior knowledge for pattern matching. We perform a series of experiments to validate our method using DARPA’s Grand Challenge Problem (GCP) datasets, the 2000 DARPA Intrusion Detection Scenario datasets, and the DEF CON 9 datasets. The results show that our approach can discover new patterns of attack relationships when the alerts of attacks are statistically correlated.

title: Anomaly detection using call stack information
abstract: The call stack of a program execution can be a very good information source for intrusion detection. There is no prior work on dynamically extracting information from the call stack and effectively using it to detect exploits. In this paper we propose a new method to do anomaly detection using call stack information. The basic idea is to extract return addresses from the call stack, and generate an abstract execution path between two program execution points. Experiments show that our method can detect some attacks that cannot be detected by other approaches, while its convergence and false positive performance is comparable to or better than the other approaches. We compare our method with other approaches by analyzing their underlying principles and thus achieve a better characterization of their performance, in particular on what and why attacks will be missed by the various approaches.

title: Search K Nearest Neighbors on Air
abstract: While the K-Nearest-Neighbor (KNN) problem is well studied in the traditional wired, disk-based client-server environment, it has not been tackled in a wireless broadcast environment. In this paper, the problem of organizing location dependent data and answering KNN queries on air are investigated. The linear property of wireless broadcast media and power conserving requirement of mobile devices make this problem particularly interesting and challenging. An efficient data organization, called sorted list, and the corresponding search algorithm are proposed and compared with the well-known spatial index, R-Tree. In addition, we develop an approximate search scope to guide the search at the very beginning of the search process and a learning algorithm to adapt the search scope during the search to improve energy and access efficiency. Simulation based performance evaluation is conducted to compare sorted list and R-Tree. The results show that the utilization of search scope and learning algorithm improves search efficiency of both index mechanisms significantly. While R-Tree is more power efficient when a large number of nearest neighbors is requested, the sorted list has better access efficiency and less power consumption when the number of nearest neighbors is small.

title: Exploiting fine-grain thread level parallelism on the MIT multi-ALU processor
abstract: Much of the improvement in computer performance over the last twenty years has come from faster transistors and architectural advances that increase parallelism. Historically, parallelism has been exploited either at the instruction level with a grain-size of a single instruction or by partitioning applications into coarse threads with grain-sizes of thousands of instructions. Fine-grain threads fill the parallelism gap between these extremes by enabling tasks with run lengths as small as 20 cycles. As this fine-grain parallelism is orthogonal to ILP and coarse threads, it complements both methods and provides an opportunity for greater speedup. This paper describes the efficient communication and synchronization mechanisms implemented in the Multi-ALU Processor (MAP) chip, including a thread creation instruction, register communication, and a hardware barrier. These register-based mechanisms provide 10 times faster communication and 60 times faster synchronization than mechanisms that operate via a shared on chip cache. With a three-processor implementation of the MAP, fine-grain speedups of 1.2-2.1 are demonstrated on a suite of applications.

title: Early termination in Ben-Or/Tiwari sparse interpolation and a hybrid of Zippel's algorithm

title: Spatial Index on Air
abstract: With the advent of wireless networking and personal digital devices, the population of mobile users will increase significantly. Broadcasting is particularly suitable for environments having a large number of clients. In this paper, we study the query processing of some typical location-dependent queries, such as window queries and kNN queries, in a broadcast system. To reduce clients' power consumption and provide efficient services, a transformation of the objects is applied based on Hilbert curve. Furthermore, a linear index structure is constructed and several algorithms are devised to answer spatial queries. Experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed transformation and related algorithms. Results show that the proposed schemes outperform existing algorithms significantly.

title: DSI: A Fully Distributed Spatial Index for Location-Based Wireless Broadcast Services
abstract: Recent announcement of the MSN Direct Service has demonstrated the feasibility and industrial interest in utilizing wireless broadcast for pervasive information services. To support location-based services in wireless data broadcast systems, a distributed spatial index (called DSI) is proposed in this paper. DSI is highly efficient because it has a linear yet fully distributed structure that facilitates multiple search paths to be naturally mixed together by sharing links. Moreover, DSI is very resilient in error-prone wireless communication environments. Search algorithms for two classical location-based queries, window queries and kNN queries, based on DSI are presented. Performance evaluation of DSI shows that DSI significantly outperforms R-tree and Hilbert Curve Index, two state-of-the-art spatial indexing techniques for wireless data broadcast