A resource-preserving self-regulating Uncoupled MAC algorithm to be applied in incident detection
The connectivity of embedded systems is increasing accompanied with thriving technology such as Internet of Things/Everything (IoT/E), Connected Cars, Smart Cities, Industry 4.0, 5G or Software-Defined Everything. Apart from the benefits of these trends, the continuous networking offers hackers a broad spectrum of attack vectors. The identification of attacks or unknown behavior through Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) has established itself as a conducive and mandatory mechanism apart from the protection by cryptographic schemes in a holistic security eco-system. In systems where resources are valuable goods and stand in contrast to the ever increasing amount of network traffic, sampling has become a useful utility in order to detect malicious activities on a manageable amount of data. In this work an algorithm – Uncoupled MAC – is presented which secures network communication through a cryptographic scheme by uncoupled Message Authentication Codes (MAC) but as a side effect also provides IDS functionality producing alarms based on the violation of Uncoupled MAC values. Through a novel self-regulation extension, the algorithm adapts it’s sampling parameters based on the detection of malicious actions. The evaluation in a virtualized environment clearly shows that the detection rate increases over runtime for different attack scenarios. Those even cover scenarios in which intelligent attackers try to exploit the downsides of sampling.
This is a preprint version of the article.
Keywords: network security, adaptive intrusion detection, message authentication, self-regulation, resource conservation
Year: 2019
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