Using a Deep Understanding of Network Activities for Network Vulnerability Assessment

Abstract

In data-communication networks, network reliability is of great concern to both network operators and customers. Therefore, network operators want to determine what services could be affected by software vulnerabilities being exploited that are present within their data-communication network. To determine what services could be affected by a software vulnerability being exploited, it is fundamentally important to know the ongoing tasks in a network. A particular task may depend on multiple network services, spanning many network devices. Unfortunately, dependency details are often not documented and are difficult to discover by relying on human expert knowledge. In monitored networks huge amounts of data are available and by applying data mining techniques, we are able to extract information of ongoing network activities. From a data mining perspective, we are interested to test the potential of applying data mining techniques to real-life applications.