Program anomaly detection: Methodology and practices

Abstract

This tutorial will present an overview of program anomaly detection, which analyzes normal program behaviors and discovers aberrant executions caused by attacks, misconfigurations, program bugs, and unusual usage patterns. It was first introduced as an analogy between intrusion detection for programs and the immune mechanism in biology. Advanced models have been developed in the last decade and comprehensive techniques have been adopted such as hidden Markov model and machine learning. We will introduce the audience to the problem of program attacks and the anomaly detection approach against threats. We will give a general definition for program anomaly detection and derive model abstractions from the definition. The audience will be walked through the development of program anomaly detection methods from early-age n-gram approaches to complicated pushdown automata and probabilistic models. Some lab tools will be provided to help understand primitive detection models. This procedure will help the audience understand the objectives and challenges in designing program anomaly detection models. We will discuss the attacks that subvert anomaly detection mechanisms. The field map of program anomaly detection will be presented. We will also briey discuss the applications of program anomaly detection in Internet of Things security. We expect the audience to get an idea of unsolved challenges in the field and develop a sense of future program anomaly detection directions after attending the tutorial.