Implementing a Generalized Tool for Network Monitoring

Determining how you were attacked is essential to developing a response or countermeasure. Usually, a system or network manager presented with a successful intrusion has very little information with which to work: a possibly corrupted system log, a firewall log, and perhaps some tcpdump output. When hackers come up with a new technique for cracking a network, it often takes the security community a while to determine the method being used. In aviation, an aircraft’s ‘‘black box’’ is used to analyze the details of a crash. We believe a similar capability is needed for networks. Being able to quickly learn how an attack works will shorten the effective useful lifetime of the attack. Additionally, the recovered attack records may be helpful in tracking or prosecuting the attacker. Since we’ve developed a general purpose statistics-gathering system, we believe it will be useful for more than just security. For example, a network manager may desire an historical record of the usage growth of certain applications, or details about the breakdown of types of traffic at different times of day. Such records will provide useful information for network managers in diagnosing performance problems or planning growth. This paper describes an architecture and toolkit for building network traffic analysis and statistical event records: The Network Flight Recorder. The NFR uses a promiscuous packet interface to pass visible traffic into an internally meta-programmed decision engine which routes information about packets and their contents into statistical or logging backends. In addition to packet analysis and collection, the NFR’s internal architecture permits network managers to sample interesting portions of network traffic for logging or statistical analysis. The NFR programming language is simple, but powerful enough that you can perform reasonable analysis on traffic before choosing to record it. For example, you might analyze SMTP transactions but only choose to record those relating to a user who is sending spam or abusive E-mail. The analysis language includes a capability for generating alert messages which the rest of the system queues, multiplexes, and delivers. A simplified hyper-query interface allows extensive browsing of the NFR’s stored datasets and statistics from any Java-enabled browser. The NFR is currently being deployed at a number of ISPs and commercial sites, and is available for download in source code form from www.nfr.net. Background and Motivation In 1990, one of the authors managed a rather chaotic network, including an embryonic firewall, using NNStat as a security tool. NNStat [1] was designed as a statistical analysis system for the NSFnet backbone, not as a security tool, but possessed several attractive properties: 1. It permits accurate and highly condensed summaries of an event on the network. 2. It permits flexible specification of types of events to record. 3. It permits flexible storage of information about the events that are observed. They are actually Safety Orange. Use of the NFR software is free for noncommercial and research purposes. A commercial release of the software is being developed. While NNStat’s authors were concerned about, for example, how much RIP traffic was crossing the network, a security conscious network manager could use NNStat to record all RIP traffic emanating from any systems that were not on an ‘‘approved list’’ of routers. Suddenly, NNStat was useful as a crude tool for mapping who and what, as well as for setting an alert to fire when something happened that the network manager believed should not. NNStat, wrapped with a bunch of quick and dirty shell scripts and cron jobs, served well as a poor man’s intrusion detection system. Other network managers have implemented similar systems using tcpdump, or more sophisticated special-purpose network watchers like ARPwatch [2], TCPwatch [3], Netman [4], clog [5], Netwatch [6], and Argus [7]. Other intrusion detection burglar alarms have focused on features of the host operating system, such as tcp_wrappers [8], klaxon [9], and tocsin [10]. Many of the monitoring systems implemen1997 LISA XI – October 26-31, 1997 – San Diego, CA 1 Implementing a Generalized Tool for Network Monitoring Ranum, et al. ted in the past contain features found in NFR. We believe that the new ground the NFR breaks is by making the filtering and analysis process internally programmed, rather than static-coded into the monitoring application. NFR is intellectually evolved from NNStat, but includes a more generalized and powerful filtering language, as well as the ability to trigger alerts and log complete packet information. A triggering specification lets data be selected from reassembled TCP sessions, providing a powerful capability for usage measurement as well as audit. The authors intend to use NFR as a platform for exploring auditing and logging, while simultaneously providing a freely available, high quality data source for researchers working on intrusion detection. Overview of the NFR Architecture The architecture of NFR was designed as a set of components, each tailored to a specific activity. Data is gathered by one or more packet suckers, forwarded to the decision engine for filtering and reassembly, and possibly recorded to a backend for storage or statistical processing. The query interface is kept completely separate from the input data flow to minimize the performance impact of a user’s querying the system while it is collecting data.