Clustering intrusion detection alarms to support root cause analysis

Abstract

It is a well-known problem that intrusion detection systems overload their human operators by triggering thousands of alarms per day. This paper presents a new approach for handling intrusion detection alarms more efficiently. Central to this approach is the notion that each alarm occurs for a reason, which is referred to as the alarm's root causes. This paper observes that a few dozens of rather persistent root causes generally account for over 90% of the alarms that an intrusion detection system triggers. Therefore, we argue that alarms should be handled by identifying and removing the most predominant and persistent root causes. To make this paradigm practicable, we propose a novel alarm-clustering method that supports the human analyst in identifying root causes. We present experiments with real-world intrusion detection alarms to show how alarm clustering helped us identify root causes. Moreover, we show that the alarm load decreases quite substantially if the identified root causes are eliminated so that they can no longer trigger alarms in the future.