Evaluating intrusion prevention systems with evasions

Mikko Särelä*, Tomi Kyöstilä, Timo Kiravuo, Jukka Manner

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

7 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Intrusion prevention systems have become a common security measure in the past 20 years. Their promise is the possibility to prevent known attacks against vulnerable, unpatched devices inside enterprise networks. However, evasion techniques that enable the attacker to evade the eye of the intrusion prevention system are a potential problem for this capability. These techniques take advantage of the robustness principle that has guided designers to create systems that will try to recreate protocol content from any input they receive. In this work, we evaluated the effectiveness of 35 well-known evasions against 9 commercial and 1 free, state-of-the-art, intrusion prevention systems. We conducted 4 experiments with one million attacks against each device. Each system lets a significant amount (0.1%-45%) of attacks pass through unrecognized. Our results show that most existing intrusion prevention systems are vulnerable against evasions.

Original languageEnglish
Article numbere3339
Number of pages15
JournalInternational Journal of Communication Systems
Volume30
Issue number16
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Nov 2017
MoE publication typeA1 Journal article-refereed

Keywords

  • AET
  • Evasion
  • Intrusion prevention systems
  • IPS
  • Network security

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