Discovery of Unexpected Services and Communication Paths in Networked Systems

Gaining a complete understanding of the active services and open communication paths present in recently created networked systems consisting of various servers and network devices is often difficult because of the rapidly expanding complexity of those services and their wide-ranging functions. Furthermore, the IT administrators of hand-designed systems often lack ways to identify and close unnecessary services and communication pathways. In this paper, we propose an automated approach to identifying and understanding the active services and the permitted communications on all servers and network devices. We then show how hand-designed networked systems containing such devices are prone to contain numerous unnecessary active services and communication paths, which exposes them to malicious actions such a service denial, information theft, and/or cyber espionage. An evaluation result shows the effectiveness of our proposed approach.

Authors and Affiliations

1. Internet Initiative Japan Inc., 1-105 Kanda jinbo-cho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, Japan

   Ichita Higurashi & Masahiko Kato

2. University of Tsukuba, 1-1-1 Tennodai, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, 305-8573, Japan

   Akira Kanaoka

3. University of Tsukuba, 1-1-1 Tennodai, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan

   Eiji Okamoto

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ichita Higurashi .

Editors and Affiliations

1. Department of Software and Information Systems, University of North Carolina Charlotte, Charlotte, North Carolina, USA

   Ehab Al-Shaer

2. Computing and Information Sciences, Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas, USA

   Xinming Ou

3. Department of Computer Science, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California, USA

   Geoffrey Xie

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