Hacker Detection: Evaluation and Improvement
Faculty Mentor: Dr. Matthew Wright, Dr. J. Carter Tiernan
Graduate Assistants: Kush Kothari
Hazard Type: Cyber Security
2010 Teacher Participants
- John Davis
- Eric Manuel
2009 Teacher Participants
- Vicki Buffalo
- Eric Manuel
- Rick Needham
- Silas Robinson
2008 Teacher Participants
- William Flynn
- William Huckeba
In today’s computer networks, security tools like firewalls remain largely ineffective in stopping hackers from gaining access and exploiting that access to steal sensitive information and disrupt critical operations. Hackers typically break into another network and use that as a stepping-stone to attack the target network. For example, a hacker might break into a more vulnerable school district’s computers and use them to launch attacks against a military network. In this project, we propose to enhance stepping-stone detection (SSD) systems that focus on finding and stopping this kind of attack.
Basic SSD methods can be broken by sophisticated hackers. To avoid prior detection methods, these hackers carefully shape their traffic to look like streaming audio, such as Internet phone traffic. We propose two main directions for this work:
- Develop new detection methods based on differences between real streaming media and fake streams used to avoid SSD.
- Develop new detection methods based on unusual patterns and timings of multimedia-like streams.
Classroom modules will include ROC curves in medicine and finding hackers. This may be incorporated into mathematics curricula.