Hypergraph Clustering for Better Network Traffic Inspection

Networked computing environments are subject to configuration errors, unauthorized users, undesired activities and attacks by malicious software. These can be detected by monitoring network traffic, but network administrators are overwhelmed by the amount of data that needs to be inspected. In this paper, we describe how clustering can be used for this application to reduce the amount of data that has to be inspected. Rather than a system that attempts to directly detect malicious software and user, we propose a data-mining component to group the open ports and users in the network and let a human system administrator analyze the results. With empirical study, we show that the behaviors of softwares and users are very different. They should be clustered by the appropriate clustering algorithm accordingly.