Open Access
A proposal of burst cloning for video quality improvement in optical burst switching networks
(2013) Espina Antolín, Félix; Morató Osés, Daniel; Izal Azcárate, Mikel; Magaña Lizarrondo, Eduardo; Automática y Computación; Automatika eta Konputazioa
Open Access
Ransomware early detection by the analysis of file sharing traffic
(Elsevier, 2018) Morató Osés, Daniel; Berrueta Irigoyen, Eduardo; Magaña Lizarrondo, Eduardo; Izal Azcárate, Mikel; Ingeniaritza Elektrikoa, Elektronikoaren eta Telekomunikazio Ingeniaritzaren; Institute of Smart Cities - ISC; Ingeniería Eléctrica, Electrónica y de Comunicación
Crypto ransomware is a type of malware that locks access to user files by encrypting them and demands a ransom in order to obtain the decryption key. This type of malware has become a serious threat for most enterprises. In those cases where the infected computer has access to documents in network shared volumes, a single host can lock access to documents across several departments in the company. We propose an algorithm that can detect ransomware action and prevent further activity over shared documents. The algorithm is based on the analysis of passively monitored traffic by a network probe. 19 different ransomware families were used for testing the algorithm in action. The results show that it can detect ransomware activity in less than 20 s, before more than 10 files are lost. Recovery of even those files was also possible because their content was stored in the traffic monitored by the network probe. Several days of traffic from real corporate networks were used to validate a low rate of false alarms. This paper offers also analytical models for the probability of early detection and the probability of false alarms for an arbitrarily large population of users.
Open Access
Crypto-ransomware detection using machine learning models in file-sharing network scenarios with encrypted traffic
(Elsevier, 2022) Berrueta Irigoyen, Eduardo; Morató Osés, Daniel; Magaña Lizarrondo, Eduardo; Izal Azcárate, Mikel; Ingeniería Eléctrica, Electrónica y de Comunicación; Ingeniaritza Elektrikoa, Elektronikoaren eta Telekomunikazio Ingeniaritzaren; Universidad Pública de Navarra / Nafarroako Unibertsitate Publikoa
Ransomware is considered as a significant threat for home users and enterprises. In corporate scenarios, users’ computers usually store only system and program files, while all the documents are accessed from shared servers. In these scenarios, one crypto-ransomware infected host is capable of locking the access to all shared files it has access to, which can be the whole set of files from a workgroup of users. We propose a tool to detect and block crypto-ransomware activity based on file-sharing traffic analysis. The tool monitors the traffic exchanged between the clients and the file servers and using machine learning techniques it searches for patterns in the traffic that betray ransomware actions while reading and overwriting files. This is the first proposal designed to work not only for clear text protocols but also for encrypted file-sharing protocols. We extract features from network traffic that describe the activity opening, closing, and modifying files. The features allow the differentiation between ransomware activity and high activity from benign applications. We train and test the detection model using a large set of more than 70 ransomware binaries from 33 different strains and more than 2,400 h of ‘not infected’ traffic from real users. The results reveal that the proposed tool can detect all ransomware binaries described, including those not used in the training phase. This paper provides a validation of the algorithm by studying the false positive rate and the amount of information from user files that the ransomware could encrypt before being detected
Open Access
Open repository for the evaluation of ransomware detection tools
(IEEE, 2020) Berrueta Irigoyen, Eduardo; Morató Osés, Daniel; Magaña Lizarrondo, Eduardo; Izal Azcárate, Mikel; Ingeniaritza Elektrikoa, Elektronikoaren eta Telekomunikazio Ingeniaritzaren; Institute of Smart Cities - ISC; Ingeniería Eléctrica, Electrónica y de Comunicación
Crypto-ransomware is a type of malware that encrypts user files, deletes the original data, and asks for ransom to recover the hijacked documents. Several articles have presented detection techniques for this type of malware; these techniques are applied before the ransomware encrypts files or during its action in an infected host. The evaluation of these proposals has always been accomplished using sets of ransomware samples that are prepared locally for the research article, without making the data available. Different studies use different sets of samples and different evaluation metrics, resulting in insufficient comparability. In this paper, we describe a public data repository containing the file access operations of more than 70 ransomware samples during the encryption of a large network shared directory. These data have already been used successfully in the evaluation of a network-based ransomware detection algorithm. Now, we are making these data available to the community and describing their details, how they were captured, and how they can be used in the evaluation and comparison of the results of most ransomware detection techniques.
Open Access
A survey on detection techniques for cryptographic ransomware
(IEEE, 2019) Berrueta Irigoyen, Eduardo; Morató Osés, Daniel; Magaña Lizarrondo, Eduardo; Izal Azcárate, Mikel; Ingeniaritza Elektrikoa, Elektronikoaren eta Telekomunikazio Ingeniaritzaren; Institute of Smart Cities - ISC; Ingeniería Eléctrica, Electrónica y de Comunicación
Crypto-ransomware is a type of malware that encrypts user files, deletes the original data, and asks for a ransom to recover the hijacked documents. It is a cyber threat that targets both companies and residential users, and has spread in recent years because of its lucrative results. Several articles have presented classifications of ransomware families and their typical behaviour. These insights have stimulated the creation of detection techniques for antivirus and firewall software. However, because the ransomware scene evolves quickly and aggressively, these studies quickly become outdated. In this study, we surveyed the detection techniques that the research community has developed in recent years. We compared the different approaches and classified the algorithms based on the input data they obtain from ransomware actions, and the decision procedures they use to reach a classification decision between benign or malign applications. This is a detailed survey that focuses on detection algorithms, compared to most previous studies that offer a survey of ransomware families or isolated proposals of detection algorithms. We also compared the results of these proposals.
Open Access
Pamplona-traceroute: topology discovery and alias resolution to build router level Internet maps
(IEEE, 2013) García-Jiménez, Santiago; Magaña Lizarrondo, Eduardo; Morató Osés, Daniel; Izal Azcárate, Mikel; Automática y Computación; Automatika eta Konputazioa
An Internet topology map at the router level not only needs to discover IP addresses in Internet paths (traceroute) but also needs to identify IP addresses belonging to the same router (IP aliases). Both processes, discovery and IP alias resolution, have traditionally been independent tasks. In this paper, a new tool called Pamplona-traceroute is proposed to improve upon current results in a state of the art for Internet topology construction at the router level. Indirect probing using TTLscoped UDP packets, usually present in the discovery phases, is reused in IP alias resolution phases, providing high identification rates, especially in access routers.
Open Access
High-speed analysis of SMB2 file sharing traffic without TCP stream reconstruction
(IEEE, 2019) Berrueta Irigoyen, Eduardo; Morató Osés, Daniel; Magaña Lizarrondo, Eduardo; Izal Azcárate, Mikel; Ingeniaritza Elektrikoa, Elektronikoaren eta Telekomunikazio Ingeniaritzaren; Institute of Smart Cities - ISC; Ingeniería Eléctrica, Electrónica y de Comunicación
This paper presents a file sharing traffic analysis methodology for Server Message Block (SMB), a common protocol in the corporate environment. The design is focused on improving the traffic analysis rate that can be obtained per CPU core in the analysis machine. SMB is most commonly transported over Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and therefore its analysis requires TCP stream reconstruction. We evaluate a traffic analysis design which does not require stream reconstruction. We compare the results obtained to a reference full reconstruction analysis, both in accuracy of the measurements and maximum rate per CPU core. We achieve an increment of 30% in the traffic processing rate, at the expense of a small loss in accuracy computing the probability distribution function for the protocol response times.
Open Access
KISS methodologies for network management and anomaly detection
(IEEE, 2018) Vega, Carlos; Aracil Rico, Javier; Magaña Lizarrondo, Eduardo; Ingeniería Eléctrica, Electrónica y de Comunicación; Ingeniaritza Elektrikoa, Elektronikoaren eta Telekomunikazio Ingeniaritzaren
Current networks are increasingly growing in size, complexity and the amount of monitoring data that they produce, which requires complex data analysis pipelines to handle data collection, centralization and analysis tasks. Literature approaches, include the use of custom agents to harvest information and large data centralization systems based on clusters to achieve horizontal scalability, which are expensive and difficult to deploy in real scenarios. In this paper we propose and evaluate a series of methodologies, deployed in real industrial production environments, for network management, from the architecture design to the visualization system as well as for the anomaly detection methodologies, that intend to squeeze the vertical resources and overcome the difficulties of data collection and centralization.
Open Access
NATRA: Network ACK-Based Traffic Reduction Algorithm
(IEEE, 2020) García-Jiménez, Santiago; Magaña Lizarrondo, Eduardo; Aracil Rico, Javier; Ingeniería Eléctrica, Electrónica y de Comunicación; Ingeniaritza Elektrikoa, Elektronikoaren eta Telekomunikazio Ingeniaritzaren
Traffic monitoring involves packet capturing and processing at a very high rate of packets per second. Typically, flow records are generated from the packet traffic, such as TCP flow records that feature the number of bytes and packets in each direction, flow duration, number of different ports, and other metrics. Delivering such flow records, about network traffic flowing at tens of Gbps is rather challenging in terms of processing power. To address this problem, traffic thinning can be applied to reduce the input load, by swiftly discarding useless packets at the sniffer NIC or driver level, which effectively reduces the load on software layers that handle traffic processing. This work proposes an algorithm that drops empty ACK packets from TCP traffic, thus achieving a significant reduction in the packets per second that must be handled by each traffic module. The tests discussed below show that the algorithm achieves a 25% decrease in the packets per second rate with minimal information loss.
Open Access
Traffic generator using Perlin Noise
(IEEE, 2012) Prieto Suárez, Iria; Izal Azcárate, Mikel; Morató Osés, Daniel; Magaña Lizarrondo, Eduardo; Automática y Computación; Automatika eta Konputazioa; Universidad Pública de Navarra / Nafarroako Unibertsitate Publikoa
Study of high speed networks such as optical next generation burst or packet switched networks require large amounts of synthetic traffic to feed simulators. Methods to generate self-similar long range dependent traffic already exist but they usually work by generating large blocks of traffic of fixed time duration. This limits simulated time or require very high amount of data to be stored before simulation. On this work it is shown how self-similar traffic can be generated using Perlin Noise, an algorithm commonly used to generate 2D/3D noise for natural looking graphics. 1-dimension Perlin Noise can be interpreted as network traffic and used to generate long range dependent traffic for network simulation. The algorithm is compared to more classical approach Random Midpoint Displacement showing at traffic generated is similar but can be generated continuously with no fixed block size.