Smart defence: an architecture for new challenges to cyber security

Abstract

The last years have seen an unprecedented amount of attacks. Intrusions on IT-Systems are rising constantly - both from a quantitative as well as a qualitative point of view. Recent examples like the hack of the Sony Playstation Network or the compromise of RSA are just some examples of high-quality attack vectors. Since these Smart Attacks are specifically designed to permeate state of the art technologies, current systems like Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) are failing to guarantee an adequate protection. In order to improve the protection, an analysis of these Smart Attacks in terms of underlying characteristics has to be performed to form a basis against those emerging threads. Following these ideas, this paper starts by presenting individual facets of Smart At- tacks in more detail. Inspired by the original definition of the term Advanced Persistent Threat of the Department of Defense, subsequently, the term Smart Attack is defined. Our architecture for Smart Defence focuses on three main elements: We propose the use of advanced geolocation for a geobased intrusion detection (e.g., inspecting new connections - originating from a location very close to where a recent attack was launched - more detailed than other connections). Furthermore, we will present our concepts on supervising Commercial Off-The Shelf (COTS) products (softand hardware), as both are nowadays used also in security environments. In addition, we will also show our concepts for similarity-based, multi-domain correlation as well as the corresponding proof-of-concept.