text: The traffic behavior of University of Louisville network with the interconnected backbone routers and the number of Virtual Local Area Network (VLAN) subnets is investigated using the Random Matrix Theory (RMT) approach. We employ the system of equal interval time series of traffic counts at all router to router and router to subnet connections as a representation of the inter-VLAN traffic. The cross-correlation matrix C of the traffic rate changes between different traffic time series is calculated and tested against null-hypothesis of random interactions. The majority of the eigenvalues i of matrix C fall within the bounds predicted by the RMT for the eigenvalues of random correlation matrices. The distribution of eigenvalues and eigenvectors outside of the RMT bounds displays prominent and systematic deviations from the RMT predictions. Moreover, these deviations are stable in time. The method we use provides a unique possibility to accomplish three concurrent tasks of traffic analysis. The method verifies the uncongested state of the network, by establishing the profile of random interactions. It recognizes the system-specific large-scale interactions, by establishing the profile of stable in time non-random interactions. Finally, by looking into the eigenstatistics we are able to detect and allocate anomalies of network traffic interactions.
  @cite_0: IP forwarding anomalies, triggered by equipment failures, implementation bugs, or configuration errors, can significantly disrupt and degrade network service. Robust and reliable detection of such anomalies is essential to rapid problem diagnosis, problem mitigation, and repair. We propose a simple, robust method that integrates routing and traffic data streams to reliably detect forwarding anomalies. The overall method is scalable, automated and self-training. We find this technique effectively identifies forwarding anomalies, while avoiding the high false alarms rate that would otherwise result if either stream were used unilaterally.
  @cite_23: Hidden semi-Markov Model (HsMM) has been well studied and widely applied to many areas. The advantage of using an HsMM is its efficient forward-backward algorithm for estimating model parameters to best account for an observed sequence. In this paper, we propose an HsMM to model the distribution of network-wide traffic and use an observation window to distinguish DoS flooding attacks mixed within the normal background traffic. Several experiments are conducted to validate our method.
  @cite_15: Detecting and understanding anomalies in IP networks is an open and ill-defined problem. Toward this end, we have recently proposed the subspace method for anomaly diagnosis. In this paper we present the first large-scale exploration of the power of the subspace method when applied to flow traffic. An important aspect of this approach is that it fuses information from flow measurements taken throughout a network. We apply the subspace method to three different types of sampled flow traffic in a large academic network: multivariate timeseries of byte counts, packet counts, and IP-flow counts. We show that each traffic type brings into focus a different set of anomalies via the subspace method. We illustrate and classify the set of anomalies detected. We find that almost all of the anomalies detected represent events of interest to network operators. Furthermore, the anomalies span a remarkably wide spectrum of event types, including denial of service attacks (single-source and distributed), flash crowds, port scanning, downstream traffic engineering, high-rate flows, worm propagation, and network outage.
  @cite_10: 
  @cite_25: 
  @cite_20: The increasing practicality of large-scale flow capture makes it possible to conceive of traffic analysis methods that detect and identify a large and diverse set of anomalies. However the challenge of effectively analyzing this massive data source for anomaly diagnosis is as yet unmet. We argue that the distributions of packet features (IP addresses and ports) observed in flow traces reveals both the presence and the structure of a wide range of anomalies. Using entropy as a summarization tool, we show that the analysis of feature distributions leads to significant advances on two fronts: (1) it enables highly sensitive detection of a wide range of anomalies, augmenting detections by volume-based methods, and (2) it enables automatic classification of anomalies via unsupervised learning. We show that using feature distributions, anomalies naturally fall into distinct and meaningful clusters. These clusters can be used to automatically classify anomalies and to uncover new anomaly types. We validate our claims on data from two backbone networks (Abilene and Geant) and conclude that feature distributions show promise as a key element of a fairly general network anomaly diagnosis framework.
summary: The urgent need for a network-wide, scalable approach to the problem of healthy network traffic profile creation is expressed in works of @cite_20 @cite_15 @cite_23 @cite_10 @cite_0 @cite_25 . There are several studies with the promising results, which demonstrate that the traffic anomalous events cause the temporal changes in statistical properties of traffic features. Lakhina, Crovella and Diot presented the characterization of the network-wide anomalies of the traffic flows. The authors studied three different types of traffic flows and fused the information from flow measurements taken throughout the entire network. They obtained and classified a different set of anomalies for different traffic types using the subspace method @cite_15 .