ProTracer: Towards Practical Provenance Tracing by Alternating Between Logging and Tainting

Provenance tracing is a very important approach to Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) attack detection and investigation. Existing techniques either suffer from the dependence explosion problem or have non-trivial space and runtime overhead, which hinder their application in practice. We propose ProTracer, a lightweight provenance tracing system that alternates between system event logging and unit level taint propagation. The technique is built on an on-the-fly system event processing infrastructure that features a very lightweight kernel module and a sophisticated user space daemon that performs concurrent and out-of-order event processing. The evaluation with different realistic system workloads and a number of attack cases show that ProTracer only produces 13MB log data per day, and 0.84GB(Server)/2.32GB(Client) in 3 months without losing any important information. The space consumption is only < 1.28% of the state-of-the-art, 7 times smaller than an off-line garbage collection technique. The run-time overhead averages <7% for servers and <5% for regular applications. The generated attack causal graphs are a few times smaller than those by existing techniques while they are equally informative. Permission to freely reproduce all or part of this paper for noncommercial purposes is granted provided that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Reproduction for commercial purposes is strictly prohibited without the prior written consent of the Internet Society, the first-named author (for reproduction of an entire paper only), and the author's employer if the paper was prepared within the scope of employment.