Two-step hierarchical scheme for detecting detoured attacks to the web server

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an improved detection scheme to protect a Web server from detoured attacks, which disclose confidential/ private information or disseminate malware codes through outbound traffic. Our scheme has a two-step hierarchy, whose detection methods are complementary to each other. The first step is a signature-based detector that uses Snort and detects the marks of disseminating malware, XSS, URL Spoofing and information leakage from the Web server. The second step is an anomaly-based detector which detects attacks by using the probability evaluation in HMM, driven by both payload and traffic characteristics of outbound packets. Through the verification analysis under the attacked Web server environment, we show that our proposed scheme improves the False Positive rate and detection efficiency for detecting detoured attacks to a Web server.