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Visualizing PHPIDS log files for better understanding of web server attacks

Published: 02 October 2013 Publication History

Abstract

The prevalence and severity of application-layer vulnerabilities increase dramatically their corresponding attacks. In this paper, we present an extension to PHPIDS, an open source intrusion detection and prevention system for PHP-based web applications, to visualize its security log. The proposed extension analyzes PHPIDS logs, correlates these logs with the corresponding web server logs, and plots the security-related events. We use a set of tightly coupled visual representations of HTTP server requests containing known and suspicious malicious content, to provide system administrators and security analysts with fine-grained visual-based querying capabilities. We present multiple case studies to demonstrate the ability of our PHPIDS visualization extension to support security analysts with analytic reasoning and decision making in response to ongoing web server attacks. Experimenting the proposed PHPIDS visualization extension on real-world datasets shows promise for providing complementary information for effective situational awareness.

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  • (2024)Dynamic Adaptive Mechanism Design and Implementation in VSS for Large-Scale Unified Log Data CollectionInternational Journal of Information Security and Privacy10.4018/IJISP.34956918:1(1-26)Online publication date: 9-Aug-2024
  • (2020)Hyperion: A Visual Analytics Tool for an Intrusion Detection and Prevention SystemIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2020.30107898(133865-133881)Online publication date: 2020
  • (2019)Association Visualization Analysis for the Application Service Layer and Network Control LayerCyber Security10.1007/978-981-13-6621-5_13(153-164)Online publication date: 20-Feb-2019
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cover image ACM Other conferences
VizSec '13: Proceedings of the Tenth Workshop on Visualization for Cyber Security
October 2013
77 pages
ISBN:9781450321730
DOI:10.1145/2517957
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 02 October 2013

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Author Tags

  1. intrusion detection systems
  2. log visualization
  3. network monitoring
  4. security data visualization
  5. web server attacks

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  • Research-article

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VizSec '13
VizSec '13: Visualization for Cyber Security
October 14, 2013
Georgia, Atlanta, USA

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VizSec '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 9 of 30 submissions, 30%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 39 of 111 submissions, 35%

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Dynamic Adaptive Mechanism Design and Implementation in VSS for Large-Scale Unified Log Data CollectionInternational Journal of Information Security and Privacy10.4018/IJISP.34956918:1(1-26)Online publication date: 9-Aug-2024
  • (2020)Hyperion: A Visual Analytics Tool for an Intrusion Detection and Prevention SystemIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2020.30107898(133865-133881)Online publication date: 2020
  • (2019)Association Visualization Analysis for the Application Service Layer and Network Control LayerCyber Security10.1007/978-981-13-6621-5_13(153-164)Online publication date: 20-Feb-2019
  • (2018)A Closer Look at Intrusion Detection System for Web ApplicationsSecurity and Communication Networks10.1155/2018/96013572018Online publication date: 14-Aug-2018
  • (2018)Analysis of Visualization Systems for Cyber SecurityRecent Developments in Intelligent Computing, Communication and Devices10.1007/978-981-10-8944-2_122(1051-1061)Online publication date: 23-Aug-2018
  • (2017)Performance-Based Comparative Assessment of Open Source Web Vulnerability ScannersSecurity and Communication Networks10.1155/2017/61581072017Online publication date: 24-May-2017
  • (2017)Toward a visualization-supported workflow for cyber alert management using threat models and human-centered design2017 IEEE Symposium on Visualization for Cyber Security (VizSec)10.1109/VIZSEC.2017.8062200(1-8)Online publication date: Oct-2017
  • (2017)Toward Theoretical Techniques for Measuring the Use of Human Effort in Visual Analytic SystemsIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics10.1109/TVCG.2016.259846023:1(121-130)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2017
  • (2016)Visual fusion of multi-source network security data based on labelled treemapInternational Journal of Networking and Virtual Organisations10.1504/IJNVO.2016.07918016:3(265-282)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2016
  • (2016)A Survey on Information Visualization for Network and Service ManagementIEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials10.1109/COMST.2015.245053818:1(285-323)Online publication date: Sep-2017
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