RCNF: Real-time Collaborative Network Forensic Scheme for Evidence Analysis

Abstract: Network forensic techniques help in tracking different types of cyber attack by monitoring and inspecting network traffic. However, with the high speed and large sizes of current networks, and the sophisticated philosophy of attackers, in particular mimicking normal behaviour and/or erasing traces to avoid detection, investigating such crimes demands intelligent network forensic techniques. This paper suggests a real-time collaborative network Forensic scheme (RCNF) that can monitor and investigate cyber intrusions. The scheme includes three components of capturing and storing network data, selecting important network features using chi-square method and investigating abnormal events using a new technique called correntropy-variation. We provide a case study using the UNSW-NB15 dataset for evaluating the scheme, showing its high performance in terms of accuracy and false alarm rate compared with three recent state-of-the-art mechanisms.