Luciano Argento

Fabrizio Angiulli, Luciano Argento, Angelo Furfaro

Signature-based and protocol-based intrusion detection systems (IDS) are employed as means to reveal content-based network attacks. Such systems have proven to be effective in identifying known intrusion attempts and exploits but they fail to recognize new types of attacks or carefully crafted variants of well known ones. This paper presents the design and the development of an anomaly-based IDS technique which is able to detect content-based attacks carried out over application level protocols, like HTTP and FTP. In order to identify anomalous packets, the payload is split up in chunks of equal length and the n-gram technique is used to learn which byte sequences usually appear in each chunk. The devised technique builds a different model for each pair <protocol of interest, packet length> and uses them to classify the incoming traffic. Models are build by means of a semi-supervised approach. Experimental results witness that the technique achieves an excellent accuracy with a very low false positive rate.

Luciano Argento, Angelo Furfaro

Collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) are used for collaboration and interaction of possibly many participants that may be spread over large distances. Both commercial and freely available CVEs exist today. Currently, CVEs are used already in a variety of different fields: gaming, business, education, social communication, and cooperative development. In this paper, a general framework is proposed for the development of a cooperative environment which is able to exploit a multi protocol network infrastructure. The framework offers support to concerns such as communication security and inter-protocol interoperability and let software engineers to focus on the specific business of the CVE under development. To show the framework effectiveness we consider, as a case of study, the design of a reusable software layer for the development of distributed card games built on top of it. This layer is, in turn, used for the implementation of a specific card game.