YAMA : a system for marking network traffic

Abstract

Computer security performance analysis requires precise labeling of traffic as either background or attack traffic. When an experiment is performed on-line, it may also be important to identify traffic from the security system. Today this is tedious and difficult, requiring personnel with a deep understanding of multiple protocols. YAMA (Your Able Marking Aide) is a tool that labels sessions and packets associated with a set of user actions given those actions, the traffic, and a network configuration (host information and web page corpus). An evaluation of a version that processes web traffic is performed using data from Alexas Top 100 Sites. YAMA 1.0 correctly associates the action of visiting a specific site with 90% of all HTTP packets, and 99% of both HTTP GET and DNS packets. Furthermore, YAMA 1.0 produces zero false positives when given a high-level event indicating a user visited one web site and packets from a different site.