2010 Articles

Automating the Injection of Believable Decoys to Detect Snooping

Bowen, Brian M.; Kemerlis, Vasileios; Rabhu, Pratap; Keromytis, Angelos D.; Stolfo, Salvatore

We propose a novel trap-based architecture for enterprise networks that detects "silent" attackers who are eavesdropping network traffic. The primary contributions of our work are the ease of injecting, automatically, large amounts of believable bait, and the integration of various detection mechanisms in the back-end. We demonstrate our methodology in a prototype platform that uses our decoy injection API to dynamically create and dispense network traps on a subset of our campus wireless network. Finally, we present results of a user study that demonstrates the believability of our automatically generated decoy traffic.