Recovery from intrusions is typically a very time-consuming operation in current systems. At a time when the cost of human resources dominates the cost of computing resources, we argue that next generation systems should be built with automated intrusion recovery as a primary goal. In this paper, we describe the design of Taser, a system that helps in selectively recovering legitimate file-system data after an attack or local damage occurs. Taser reverts tainted, i.e. attack-dependent, file-system operations but preserves legitimate operations. This process is difficult for two reasons. First, the set of tainted operations is not known precisely. Second, the recovery process can cause conflicts when legitimate operations depend on tainted operations. Taser provides several analysis policies that aid in determining the set of tainted operations. To handle conflicts, Taser uses automated resolution policies that isolate the tainted operations. Our evaluation shows that Taser is effective in recovering from a wide range of intrusions as well as damage caused by system management errors.

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Over the past year, there have been several reports of malicious code exploiting vulnerabilities in the Bluetooth protocol. While the research community has started to investigate a diverse set of Bluetooth security issues, little is known about the feasibility and the propagation dynamics of a worm in a Bluetooth environment. This paper is an initial attempt to remedy this situation.We start by showing that the Bluetooth protocol design and implementation is large and complex. We gather traces and we use controlled experiments to investigate whether a large-scale Bluetooth worm outbreak is viable today. Our data shows that starting a Bluetooth worm infection is easy, once a vulnerability is discovered. Finally, we use trace-drive simulations to examine the propagation dynamics of Bluetooth worms. We find that Bluetooth worms can infect a large population of vulnerable devices relatively quickly, in just a few days.

Abstract-When computer intrusions occur, one of the most costly, time-consuming, and human-intensive tasks is the analysis and recovery of the compromised system. At a time when the cost of human resources dominates the cost of CPU, network, and storage resources, we argue that computing systems should, in fact, be built with automated analysis and recovery as a primary goal. Towards this end, we describe the design, implementation, and evaluation of Forensix: a robust, high-precision reconstruction and analysis system for supporting the computer equivalent of "TiVo". The Forensix system records all activity of a target computer and allows for efficient, automated reconstruction of the activity when needed by investigators. Such a system could eventually be used by law enforcement officials to provide evidence in criminal cases as well as by companies to prove or disprove alleged hacking activity.Forensix uses three key mechanisms to improve the accuracy and reduce the human overhead of performing forensic analysis. First it performs comprehensive monitoring of the execution of a target system at the kernel event level, giving a high-resolution, application-independent view of all activity. Second, it streams the kernel event information, in realtime, to append-only storage on a separate, hardened, logging machine, making the system resilient to a wide variety of attacks. Third, it uses database technology to support high-level querying of the archived log, greatly reducing the human cost of performing forensic analysis. Forensix is built on top of Linux and is freely available [1].