Kidemonas: The Silent Guardian

Abstract: Advanced Persistent Threats or APTs are big challenges to the security of government organizations or industry systems. These threats may result in stealth attacks, but if the attack is confronted before the attacker end goal has been achieved, the attackers could become aggressive by changing the mode of attack or by resorting to some form of contingency plan, which might cause unexpected damage. Therefore, the attack detection and the notification to the system administrator should be done surreptitiously. This paper presents an architecture, called Kidemonas, to silently detect the threat and secretly report it to the user or the system administrator. This way the attacker is deceived into carrying out the attack, without sending any clear signal so that the defender can buy time to develop countermeasures to deal with the attack. We consider several attack scenarios and perform a security analysis to demonstrate the features of Kidemonas.