Sweeper: a lightweight end-to-end system for defending against fast worms

The vulnerabilities that plague computers cause endless grief to users. Slammer compromised millions of hosts in minutes; a hit-list worm would take under a second. Recently proposed techniques respond better than manual approaches, but require expensive instrumentation, which limits deployment. Although spreading "antibodies" (e.g. signatures) ameliorates this limitation, hosts depending on antibodies are defenseless until inoculation; to the fastest hit-list worms this delay is crucial. Additionally, most recently proposed techniques cannot provide recovery to provide continuous service after an attack.

We propose a novel solution called Sweeper that provides both fast and accurate post-attack analysis and efficient recovery with low normal execution overhead. Sweeper in-novatively combines several techniques: (1) Sweeper uses lightweight monitoring techniques to detect a wide array of suspicious requests, providing a first level of defense. (2) By cleverly leveraging lightweight checkpointing, Sweeper postpones heavyweight monitoring until absolutely necessary --- after an attack is detected. Sweeper rolls back and re-executes multiple times to dynamically apply heavyweight analysis techniques via dynamic binary instrumentation. Since only the execution involved in the attack is analyzed, the analysis is efficient, yet thorough. (3) Based on the analysis results, Sweeper automatically generates low-overhead antibodies to prevent future attacks of the same vulnerability. (4) Finally, Sweeper again re-executes to perform fast recovery for continuous service.

We implement Sweeper in a real system. Our experimental results with three real-world servers and four real security vulnerabilities show that Sweeper can detect an attack and generate antibodies in under 60 milliseconds. Our results also show that Sweeper imposes under 1% overhead during normal execution, clearly suitable for widespread production deployment (especially since Sweeper also allows partial deployment). Finally, we analytically show that, for a fast hit-list worm otherwise capable of infecting all vulnerable hosts in under a second, Sweeper contains the extent of infection to under 5%.