An Architecture Design of Distributed Internet Worm Detection System for Fast Response

As the power of influence of the Internet grows steadily, attacks against the Internet can cause enormous monetary damages nowadays. A worm can not only replicate itself like a virus but also propagate itself across the Internet. So it infects vulnerable hosts in the Internet and then downgrades the overall performance of the Internet or makes the Internet not to work. To response this, worm detection and prevention technologies are developed. The worm detection technologies are classified into two categories, host based detection and network based detection. Host based detection methods are a method which checks the files that worms make, a method which checks the integrity of the file systems and so on. Network based detection methods are a misuse detection method which compares traffic payloads with worm signatures and anomaly detection methods which check inbound/outbound scan rates, ICMP host/port unreachable message rates, and TCP RST packet rates. However, single detection methods like the aforementioned can't response worms' attacks effectively because worms attack the Internet in the distributed fashion. In this paper, we propose a design of distributed worm detection system to overcome the inefficiency. Existing distributed network intrusion detection systems cooperate with each other only with their own information. Unlike this, in our proposed system, a worm detection system on a network in which worms select targets and a worm detection system on a network in which worms propagate themselves cooperate with each other with the direction-aware information in terms of worm's lifecycle. The direction-aware information includes the moving direction of worms and the service port attacked by worms. In this way, we can not only reduce false positive rate of the system but also prevent worms from propagating themselves across the Internet through dispersing the confirmed worm signature.