Experience with EMERALD to Date

Abstract

After summarizing the EMERALD architecture and the evolutionary process from which EMERALD has evolved, this paper focuses on our experience to date in designing, implementing, and applying EMERALD to various types of anomalies and misuse. The discussion addresses the fundamental importance of good software engineering practice and the importance of the system architecture -- in attaining detectability, interoperability, general applicability, and future evolvability. It also considers the importance of correlation among distributed and hierarchical instances of EMERALD, and needs for additional detection and analysis components. 1. Introduction EMERALD (Event Monitoring Enabling Responses to Anomalous Live Disturbances) [6, 8, 9] is an environment for anomaly and misuse detection and subsequent analysis of the behavior of systems and networks. EMERALD is being developed under DARPA/ITO Contract number F30602-96-C-0294 and applied under DARPA/ISO Contract number F30602-98-C-0059. EMER...