Flow-Data Gathering Using NetFlow Sensors for Fitting Malicious-Traffic Detection Models

[EN] Advanced persistent threats (APTs) are a growing concern in cybersecurity. Many companies and governments have reported incidents related to these threats. Throughout the life cycle of an APT, one of the most commonly used techniques for gaining access is network attacks. Tools based on machine...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Campazas Vega, Adrián, Crespo Martínez, Ignacio Samuel, Guerrero Higueras, Ángel Manuel, Fernández Llamas, Camino
Format: article
Status:Published version
Publication Date:2020
Country:España
Institution:Universidad Rey Juan Carlos
Repository:BULERIA. Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de León
OAI Identifier:oai:buleria.unileon.es:10612/19087
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/10612/19087
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:Cibernética
Informática
NetFlow
Packet Flow
Advanced Persistent Threat
Malicious traffic
Dataset
1207.03 Cibernética
1203.17 Informática
Description
Summary:[EN] Advanced persistent threats (APTs) are a growing concern in cybersecurity. Many companies and governments have reported incidents related to these threats. Throughout the life cycle of an APT, one of the most commonly used techniques for gaining access is network attacks. Tools based on machine learning are effective in detecting these attacks. However, researchers usually have problems with finding suitable datasets for fitting their models. The problem is even harder when flow data are required. In this paper, we describe a framework to gather flow datasets using a NetFlow sensor. We also present the Docker-based framework for gathering netflow data (DOROTHEA), a Docker-based solution implementing the above framework. This tool aims to easily generate taggable network traffic to build suitable datasets for fitting classification models. In order to demonstrate that datasets gathered with DOROTHEA can be used for fitting classification models for malicious-traffic detection, several models were built using the model evaluator (MoEv), a general-purpose tool for training machine-learning algorithms. After carrying out the experiments, four models obtained detection rates higher than 93%, thus demonstrating the validity of the datasets gathered with the tool.