Storage-based Intrusion Detection: Watching storage activity for suspicious behavior
Adam G. Pennington, John D. Strunk, John Linwood Griffin, Craig A. N. Soules, Garth R. Goodson, Gregory R. Ganger · 2002
Storage-based intrusion detection allows storage systems to transparently watch for suspicious activity. Storage systems are well-positioned to spot several common intruder actions, such as adding backdoors, inserting Trojan horses, and tampering with audit logs. Further, an intrusion detection system (IDS) embedded in a storage device continues to operate even after client systems are compromised. This paper describes a number of specific warning signs visible at the storage interface. It describes and evaluates a storage IDS, embedded in an NFS server, demonstrating both feasibility and efficiency of storage-based intrusion detection. In particular, both the performance overhead and memory required (40 KB for a reasonable set of rules) are minimal. With small extensions, storage IDSs can also be embedded in block-based storage devices.