Eliot C. Gillum

How dynamic are IP addresses

This paper introduces a novel algorithm, UDmap, to identify dynamically assigned IP addresses and analyze their dynamics pattern. UDmap is fully automatic, and relies only on application-level server logs. We applied UDmap to a month-long Hotmail user-login trace and identified a significant number of dynamic IP addresses - more than 102 million. This suggests that the fraction of IP addresses that are dynamic is by no means negligible. Using this information in combination with a three-month Hotmail email server log, we were able to establish that 95.6% of mail servers setup on the dynamic IP addresses in our trace sent out solely spam emails. Moreover, these mail servers sent out a large amount of spam - amounting to 42.2% of all spam emails received by Hotmail. These results highlight the importance of being able to accurately identify dynamic IP addresses for spam filtering. We expect similar benefits to arise for phishing site identification and botnet detection. To our knowledge, this is the first successful attempt to automatically identify and understand IP address dynamics.

Innocent by association: early recognition of legitimate users

This paper presents the design and implementation of Souche, a system that recognizes legitimate users early in online services. This early recognition contributes to both usability and security. Souche leverages social connections established over time. Legitimate users help identify other legitimate users through an implicit vouching process, strategically controlled within vouching trees. Souche is lightweight and fully transparent to users. In our evaluation on a real dataset of several hundred million users, Souche can efficiently identify 85% of legitimate users early, while reducing the percentage of falsely admitted malicious users from 44% to 2.4%. Our evaluation further indicates that Souche is robust in the presence of compromised accounts. It is generally applicable to enhance usability and security for a wide class of online services.

SocialWatch: detection of online service abuse via large-scale social graphs

In this paper, we present a framework, SocialWatch, to detect attacker-created accounts and hijacked accounts for online services at a large scale. SocialWatch explores a set of social graph properties that effectively model the overall social activity and connectivity patterns of online users, including degree, PageRank, and social affinity features. These features are hard to mimic and robust to attacker counter strategies. We evaluate SocialWatch using a large, real dataset with more than 682 million users and over 5.75 billion directional relationships. SocialWatch successfully detects 56.85 million attacker-created accounts with a low false detection rate of 0.75% and a low false negative rate of 0.61%. In addition, SocialWatch detects 1.95 million hijacked accounts---among which 1.23 million were not detected previously---with a low false detection rate of 2%. Our work demonstrates the practicality and effectiveness of using large social graphs with billions of edges to detect real attacks.