CoreFlow: Enriching Bro security events using network traffic monitoring data

Attacks against network infrastructures can be detected by Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS). Still reaction to these events are often limited by the lack of larger contextual information in which they occurred. In this paper we present CoreFlow, a framework for the correlation and enrichment of IDS data with network flow information. CoreFlow ingests data from the Bro IDS and augments this with flow data from the devices in the network. By doing this the network providers are able to reconstruct more precisely the route followed by the malicious flows. This enables them to devise tailored countermeasures, e.g. blocking close to the source of the attack. We tested the initial CoreFlow prototype in the ESnet network, using inputs from 3 Bro systems and more than 50 routers.