The next generation cognitive security operations center: Network flow forensics using cybersecurity intelligence

Abstract

A Security Operations Center (SOC) can be defined as an organized and highly skilled team that uses advanced computer forensics tools to prevent, detect and respond to cybersecurity incidents of an organization. The fundamental aspects of an effective SOC is related to the ability to examine and analyze the vast number of data flows and to correlate several other types of events from a cybersecurity perception. The supervision and categorization of network flow is an essential process not only for the scheduling, management, and regulation of the network’s services, but also for attacks identification and for the consequent forensics’ investigations. A serious potential disadvantage of the traditional software solutions used today for computer network monitoring, and specifically for the instances of effective categorization of the encrypted or obfuscated network flow, which enforces the rebuilding of messages packets in sophisticated underlying protocols, is the requirements of computational resources. In addition, an additional significant inability of these software packages is they create high false positive rates because they are deprived of accurate predicting mechanisms. For all the reasons above, in most cases, the traditional software fails completely to recognize unidentified vulnerabilities and zero-day exploitations. This paper proposes a novel intelligence driven Network Flow Forensics Framework (NF3) which uses low utilization of computing power and resources, for the Next Generation Cognitive Computing SOC (NGC2SOC) that rely solely on advanced fully automated intelligence methods. It is an effective and accurate Ensemble Machine Learning forensics tool to Network Traffic Analysis, Demystification of Malware Traffic and Encrypted Traffic Identification. © 2018 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.