zeek-osquery: Host-Network Correlation for Advanced Monitoring and Intrusion Detection

Abstract: Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) can analyze network traffic for signs of attacks and intrusions. However, encrypted communication limits their visibility and sophisticated attackers additionally try to evade their detection. To overcome these limitations, we extend the scope of Network IDSs (NIDSs) with additional data from the hosts. For that, we propose the integrated open-source zeek-osquery platform that combines the Zeek IDS with the osquery host monitor. Our platform can collect, process, and correlate host and network data at large scale, e.g., to attribute network flows to processes and users. The platform can be flexibly extended with own detection scripts using already correlated, but also additional and dynamically retrieved host data. A distributed deployment enables it to scale with an arbitrary number of osquery hosts. Our evaluation results indicate that a single Zeek instance can manage more than 870 osquery hosts and can attribute more than 96% of TCP connections to host-side applications and users in real-time.