Cyber Situation Awareness via IP Flow Monitoring

Cyber situation awareness has been recognized as a vital requirement for effective cyber defense. Cyber situation awareness allows cybersecurity operators to identify, understand, and anticipate incoming threats. Achieving and maintaining the cyber situation awareness is a challenging task given the continuous evolution of the computer networks, increasing volume and speeds of the data in a network, and rising number of threats to network security. Our work contributes to the continuous evolution of cyber situation awareness by the research of novel approaches to the perception and comprehension of a computer network. We concentrate our research efforts on the domain of IP flow network monitoring. We propose improvements to the IP flow monitoring techniques that enable the enhanced perception of a computer network. Further, we conduct detailed analyses of network traffic, which allows for an in-depth understanding of host behavior in a computer network. Last but not least, we propose a novel approach to IP flow network monitoring that enables real-time cyber situation awareness.