FP7-ICT-216026-WOMBAT

The program of the 2nd WOMBAT workshop is now available.

September 22nd:

• 12:00-14:00: Registration and lunch
• 14.00-14.10: Official welcome and introduction (H. Debar)
• 14.10-14.40: "Introduction to the WOMBAT datasets" (M. Dacier)
• 14.45-15.15: "The WOMBAT WAPI: idea, implementation and use" (C. Leita)
• 15.15-16.00: "The SHELIA and HNS client honeypot datasets" (H. Bos; P. Kijewski)
• 16.00-16.15: Coffee Break and preparation for the demos
• 16.15-18.30: Demos
• Adjourn

September 23rd

• 9.00-9.30:"Clustering malware with ANUBIS and SGNET and interaction with the WAPI" (P. M. Comparetti)
• 9.30-12.30: Demos with coffee break
• 12.30: lunch, closing of the workshop

The registration for the WOMBAT workshop can be done on the RAID+ESORICS registration page. If you wish to register for the workshop alone, you should use the RAID+WOMBAT registration and mention it in the comments. The registration fee for the workshop alone is 50 Euros.

The WOMBAT consortium will organise its second open workshop in St 
Malo, France, on September 22-23 (from Tuesday 12:00 - Wednesday 12:00). 

The workshop is conveniently co-located with RAID and organised just before the main conference. The workshop will be practical and hands-on. Attendance will be limited to 45 researchers. Registration should be made through the RAID registration site by selecting the RAID+WOMBAT option.

By means of presentations, participants will learn what sources of 
information Wombat makes available to analysts, security experts and researchers. These sources include malware repositories and attack related databases such as those of Anubis, Symantec, HoneySpider, VirusTotal, Noah, SGNet, and several others. Moreover, participants will be allowed to get hands-on experience in an exciting tutorial session in which the participant uses a variety of sensors and databases to analyse different security incidents.

We believe that the availability of a large set of databases and a way to access all of them conveniently will be crucial for any security expert. By means of a simple API, WOMBAT allows users to do so in an intuitive manner, while allowing the data owners to keep control over exactly what data can be shared and how.

http://www.moocowfanclub.com/activities/crafts/origami/wombat

The WOMBAT workshop will organize its second workshop in St Malo, France, September 22-23, 2009 noon-to-noon, just before RAID 2009. Attendance will be limited to 45 researchers. Additional information will be announced here.

WOMBAT poo paper launch

Marc Dacier from symantec has presented a one hour lecture at the ZISC Information Security colloquium (http://www.zisc.ethz.ch/events/infseccolloquium_FS2009) including pointers to WOMBAT.

In order to assure accuracy and realism of resilience assessment methods and tools, it is essential to have access to field data that are unbiased and representative. Several initiatives are taking place that offer access to malware samples for research purposes. Papers are published where techniques have been assessed thanks to these samples. Definition of benchmarking datasets is the next step ahead. In this presentation, we report on the lessons learned while collecting and analyzing malware samples in a large scale collaborative effort. Three different environments are described and their integration used to highlight the open issues that remain with such data collection. Three main lessons are offered to the reader. First, creation of representative malware samples datasets is probably an impossible task. Second, false negative alerts are not what we think they are. Third, false positive alerts exist where we were not used to see them. These three lessons have to be taken into account by those who want to assess the resilience of techniques with respect to malicious faults.

These are the results of a joint work carried out in the context of the European funded WOMBAT project, together with partners from Hispasec Systemas, EURECOM institute and Symantec Research Labs Europe (see http://wombat-project.eu/ for more on the WOMBAT project). Zurich_ZISC_presentation.pdf

As part of his presentation at the e-COPP conference, P. Kijewski (NASK) will introduce the WOMBAT project.

The following paper has been accepted at the Network and Distributed Systems Security (NDSS) 2009 conference:

Title: Scalable, Behavior-Based Malware Clustering
Authors:

• Ulrich Bayer, TUV
• Paolo Milani Comparetti, TUV
• Clemens Hlauschek, TUV
• Christopher Kruegel, UCSB
• Engin Kirda, Eurecom

Anti-malware companies receive thousands of malware samples every day. To process this large quantity, a number of automated analysis tools were developed. These tools execute a malicious program in a controlled environment and produce reports that summarize the program's actions. Of course, the problem of analyzing the reports still remains. Recently, researchers have started to explore automated clustering techniques that help to identify samples that exhibit similar behavior. This allows an analyst to discard reports of samples that have been seen before, while focusing on novel, interesting threats. Unfortunately, previous techniques do not scale well and frequently fail to generalize the observed activity well enough to recognize related malware.

In this paper, we propose a scalable clustering approach to identify and group malware samples that exhibit similar behavior. For this, we first perform dynamic analysis to obtain the execution traces of malware programs. These execution traces are then generalized into behavioral profiles, which characterize the activity of a program in more abstract terms. The profiles serve as input to an efficient clustering algorithm that allows us to handle sample sets that are an order of magnitude larger than previous approaches. We have applied our system to real-world malware collections. The results demonstrate that our technique is able to recognize and group malware programs that behave similarly, achieving a better precision than previous approaches. To underline the scalability of the system, we clustered a set of more than 75 thousand samples in less than three hours.

The WOMBAT proect will be represented at the Future Internet Assembly conference in Madrid, December 2008, by the following people:

• Vincent Boutroux, France Télécom R&D/Orange Labs
• Sotiris Ioannidis, FORTH (also representing FORWARD)
• Philip Homburg, VU (Also representing FORWARD)
• Paolo Milani Comparetti, TUV

The WOMBAT project will be represented by the following people at the ICT 2008 Conference:

• Vincent Boutroux, France Télécom R&D/Orange Labs
• Marc Dacier, Symantec
  

Hervé Debar participates in working group 1 of the Think-Trust project.

The WOMBAT project was represented by Hervé Debar at the SEC 2008 Conference in Paris, September 2008. 

This document contains a description of the wombat architecture and a high level design
of the new sensors. The wombat architecture is covered by a comprehensive review of
all its components. Part of this architecture is also the data sources and especially the
new ones that will be implemented as part of the wombat project. Each of them will
be described in the design level, focusing on the way that they will be integrated with
the wombat infrastructure

FP7-ICT-216026-Wombat-WP3-D06_V02_Infrastructure_design.pdf

M. Corrado LEITA will publicly defend his UNS Doctoral Thesis 
on Thursday, December 4th 2008 at 2:00 pm, in the Amphitheater MARCONI at EURECOM.

Topic of the Thesis:

"SGNET: automated protocol learning for the observation of malicious threats"

Jury members :

• Marc DACIER (Symantec)
• Vern PAXSON (ICSI)
• Hervé DEBAR (France Télécom R&D/Orange Labs)
• Engin KIRDA (Eurecom)
• Christopher KRUEGEL (UCSB)
• Mohamed KAANICHE (LAAS CNRS)
• Sotiris IOANNIDIS (FORTH)

One of the main prerequisites for the development of reliable defenses to protect a network resource consists in the collection of quantitative data on  Internet threats. This attempt to "know your enemy" leads to an increasing interest in the collection and exploitation of datasets providing intelligence on network attacks. The creation of these datasets is a very challenging task. The challenge derives from the need to cope with the spatial and quantitative diversity of malicious activities. The observations need to be performed on a broad perspective, since the activities are not uniformly distributed over the IP space. At the same time, the data collectors need to be sophisticated enough to extract a sufficient amount of information on each activity and perform meaningful inferences. How to combine the simultaneous need to deploy a vast number of data collectors with the need of sophistication required to make meaningful observations? This work addresses this challenge by proposing a protocol learning technique based on bioinformatics algorithms. The proposed technique allows to automatically generate low-cost protocol responders starting from a set of samples of network interaction. Its characteristics are exploited in a distributed honeypot deployment that collected information on Internet attacks for a period of 8 months in 23 different networks distributed all over the world (Europe, Australia, United States). This information is organized in a central dataset enriched with contextual information from a number of sources and analysis tools. Simple data mining techniques proposed in this work allow the generation of a valuable overview on the propagation techniques employed by nowadays malware.

The WOMBAT project has received numerous requests for interaction, either to provide data to the project for analysis or to use the information collected by the project.

Our current answer to these requests is to suggest that, if you are interested in participating, you join one of the project partners' initiatives. The current suggestion is to install an SGNet honeypot through the leurre.com project, http://www.leurrecom.org/. This will enable you to collect data and provide it to the project. It will also enable you to access some of the data collected by others throgh well specified interfaces, and carry out your own data analysis research.

If you are a large data collector, we also have an interface for data exchange, run by FORTH in Greece. Please contact us if you feel that you fall into this category

This document outlines the requirements for early warning systems built on technology provided by the WOMBAT project, setting out both: functional and non-functional requirements. The collected requirements reflect the identified user needs and the key directions to be followed within the research and development Work-packages (WP3-Data Collection and Distribution, WP4-Data Enrichment and Characterization, WP5-Threat Intelligence).

The document starts from an assessment of user requirements gathered from potential users including external participants in the Closed Workshop and the WOMBAT development group. This part covers expectations of distinct classes of data users such as: security vendors, malware researchers, ISPs, CERT teams, Government, financial institutions and home users. It details the requirements for the system architecture, data and system functions, and specifies performance, availability and security features to provide sufficient functionality. It also defines user interface, testing and configuration management requirements.

FP7-ICT-216026-Wombat_WP2_D05_V01_Requirements.pdf

This document contains a detailed analysis of the state-of-the-art tools and research approaches for malware collection and analysis. We have reviewed high/medium/low-interaction honeypots and malware collection tools and worldwide initiatives. The analysis of the collected malware is covered by a comprehensive review of the most relevant research proposals, also including techniques that have been used to analyze running programs in general, to be adapted for the wombat purposes.

FP7-ICT-216026-Wombat-WP2_D03_V01_State_art.pdf.

Institute for Infocomm Research

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Stefano Zanero from Politecnico di Milano will present the WOMBAT project during the ENISA Awareness phone conference on June 20th, 2008. We will briefly describe WOMBAT, an EU FP7 STREP project which began on 01/01/2008, which aims to build an automatic, global network which can perform early warning, automatic classification and analysis of malware and exploits as they propagate, or are used, worldwide. We will outline the challenges we see in the project, and the project goals.

NASK announces its participation to the WOMBAT project (in polish).

Symantec announces its participation in the WOMBAT project (local pdf copy).

The news has been relayed by the press, see Computing (UK) (local pdf copy), IT Week (UK) (local pdf copy), CNN Money (US) (local pdf copy), FOX Business (US) (local pdf copy) and Trading Markets.com (local pdf copy).

Hispasec Systemas announces its participation to the WOMBAT project (in spanish).

Partner description
The Research and Academic Computer Network (NASK) is a research and development unit active in Poland since March 1991. It was set up to connect Poland and the scientific-academic community to the Internet. Currently, NASK is one of the main Internet Service Providers in Poland and operator of the '.pl' country top level domain. The primary NASK group that will take part in the project is CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) Polska, a team within NASK, set up to handle Internet security incidents for the '.pl' constituency. It will be supported by members of the NASK Research Division. CERT Polska has been operational since 1996 (until 2000 known as CERT NASK). The team cooperates with other IRTs from around the world under the auspices of FIRST (Forum of Incident Response Security Teams) and with many ISPs, banks and government institutions in Poland. It also runs ARAKIS, a nation-wide early warning system, that uses a large distributed network of sensors located in various Polish institutions to collect and analyze network activity to detect new threats. CERT Polska has contributed to EU funded projects, under FP5 (eCSIRT.net) and the Safer Internet Action Plan (SpotSpam and NIFC Hotline Polska). Representatives from NASK, including CERT Polska team members play active roles (Management Board member, National Liaison Officer and Working Group members) in cooperation with ENISA.
Partner specific involvement in the wombat project
NASK has extensive practical experience in the area of honeypot technology achieved through the design, implementation, deployment and maintenance of a wide network of honeypot based sensors (one of the initial data sources for WOMBAT). The CERT contribution will be unique as it will be based on over a 10 year practical experience in security incident handling. The team will focus on the development of threat intelligence acquisition from a CERT perspective (WP5). Moreover, it will engage in state of the art analysis, formulation of requirements (WP2), design of interfaces between WOMBAT and the ARAKIS system (WP3), testing of new sensors (WP3), as well as the evaluation of the proposed data enrichment and malware characterization methods (WP4). Dissemination will also be handled, in particular in the IRT community (WP6).

Partner description
France Télécom R&D is the corporate research and development arm of France Télécom, in charge of specifying, implementing and testing advanced services for the company. The group involved in the project is the Network and Services Security (NSS) laboratory of the Middleware and Advanced Platforms (MAPS) research and development center. The NSS laboratory is 65 people strong and covers all areas of research and development in information systems security. Beyond security engineering, the laboratory has a strong focus on research, funding more than 12 man-years on research issues, hosting 10 PhD students and managing external research contracts with leading French research institutions such as Supélec or the Groupement des Ecoles de Telecommunications (GET). The laboratory also contributes to several European projects, such as Ecrypt (NoE), Artist (NoE), Resist (NoE), Diadem (STREP) and Daidalos (IP).
Partner specific involvement in the wombat project
France Télécom R&D is the project coordinator; it has exhaustive experience in handling collaborative research projects at the European level. Furthermore, France Télécom R&D has significant research contributions in the project related to malware collection and analysis. As a participant to several honeypot alliances and an operator of specific wireless honeypot technologies, France Télécom will produce scientific research results for the project. As an industrial partner, France Télécom wishes to exploit the project results during the development of the Livebox^TM home or SME Internet gateway, and the hardening of its networking infrastructure. In WP3, France Télécom will contribute alternative honeypot technologies, related to wireless networks and to clientside honeypots. In WP4, France Télécom will develop new malware models using grammars to describe their behavior, and will use these grammars in WP5 to evaluate the detection capabilities of the tools we have in place for detecting malware propagation.

On April 21st-22nd, the WOMBAT project will organize an invitation-only workshop (located in Amsterdam, Netherlands) to address the difficulties in collaboration and attack data sharing. The discussion will address standards for data exchange, infrastructural challenges, and the resolution of privacy and competition issues in data sharing. The project partners will present the vision of the project, and a draft version of our requirements analysis. The invited participants will share their own technical infrastructures and research directions. Some of the revised papers presented at the workshop will be released in a volume of proceedings.

The aim of WOMBAT is to provide new means to understand the existing and emerging threats that are targeting the Internet economy and the net citizens.

FP7-ICT-216026-Wombat-WP1_DN-A_V01_WOMBAT_Project_Fact_Sheet_from_EU.pdf