Log-Based Distributed Security Event Detection Using Simple Event Correlator

Log event correlation is an effective means of detecting system faults and security breaches encountered in information technology environments. Centralized, database-driven log event correlation is common, but suffers from flaws such as high network bandwidth utilization, significant requirements for system resources, and difficulty in detecting certain suspicious behaviors. Distributed event correlation is often assumed to be superior, but no research effort has been made which quantitatively evaluates its advantages and disadvantages. This research presents a distributed event correlation system which performs security event detection, and evaluates it experimentally, compared with a centralized alternative. The comparison measures the value in distributed event correlation by considering network bandwidth utilization, detection capability and database query efficiency. The implementation of these advantages allows a 99% reduction of network syslog traffic in the low accountability case. In addition, the system detects every implemented malicious use case, with a low false positive rate.