A Mission-Impact-Based Approach to INFOSEC Alarm Correlation

We describe a mission-impact-based approach to the analysis of security alerts produced by spatially distributed heterogeneous information security (INFOSEC) devices, such as firewalls, intrusion detection systems, authentication services, and antivirus software. The intent of this work is to deliver an automated capability to reduce the time and cost of managing multiple INFOSEC devices through a strategy of topology analysis, alert prioritization, and common attribute-based alert aggregation. Our efforts to date have led to the development of a prototype system called the EMERALD Mission Impact Intrusion Report Correlation System, or M-Correlator. M-Correlator is intended to provide analysts (at all experience levels) a powerful capability to automatically fuse together and isolate those INFOSEC alerts that represent the greatest threat to the health and security of their networks.