[Dailydave] You cannot use IDS data to talk about 0days or attacks.

[dave aitel]

This paper is bad in many ways, but in particular it confuses binaries
with 0day (which are more related to vulnerabilities), uses a simplistic
"windows of vulnerability" model, and uses the Symantec WINE dataset to
try to derive real data from.
https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~tdumitra/public_documents/bilge12_zero_day.pdf

A brief word about the WINE dataset and datasets like it: It is
impossible to remove massive observer bias from them. All I want you to
do is read the above paper and ask yourself "If the most used 0day on
the market was in Symantec's endpoint protection, what would this paper
look like?"  A good rule of thumb is that if someone is talking about
"Windows of vulnerability" they have oversimplified the problem beyond
recognition.

What you get with people who rely on IDS data to talk about 0days is a
bizarre level of cognitive dissonance when it comes down to how bad
their data is for the conclusions they are trying to draw. The only
valid thing you can say from that kind of data is "sometimes we get
lucky and find an 0day". And the same thing is true when looking at the
Verizon data to try to understand attacks. Their conclusions this year
are demonstrably nonsensical, but every year has been the same basic
methodology...

This is a must read:
http://blog.trailofbits.com/2016/05/05/the-dbirs-forest-of-exploit-signatures/


But when you hear me go on and on about how Academia has completely lost
its way in security, it's because of papers like the one at the top of
this email. When you don't have the data you need to make a conclusion,
but you are forced to publish something, you get shit results. And then
we make government and corporate policy decisions based on those results.

-dave
(P.S. The Windows emulator WINE is great, and not related to the
Symantec WINE dataset:
https://www.caida.org/workshops/telescope/slides/telescope1103_wine.pdf)
(P.P.S. A behavioral Windows dataset would actually be of great value.
Maybe Crowdstrike could drop one out?)


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