Synthetic Event Injection for Security Alerting Pipeline Validation
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing network security systems struggle to continuously validate detection signatures, leading to potential failure in identifying new security threats and ensuring the integrity of the alerting pipeline.
Innovation Solution
The implementation of synthetic network security events that mimic actual security events, allowing for ongoing integrity checks of the alerting pipeline by testing whether appropriate detection rules are triggered, without causing the system to respond as if it were a real event.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If synthetic events are injected into the alerting pipeline for continuous validation, then detection rule reliability is improved, but system complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
A synthetic event generator component is introduced as an intermediary that creates and injects synthetic security events into the alerting pipeline. This mediator enables continuous validation of detection rules without requiring direct modification of the core security system, thus improving reliability while managing complexity through modular addition
Solution Approach 2:
Synthetic events are created as copies or simulations of real security events, allowing the system to validate detection rules using replicated event data. These synthetic copies mimic the structure and characteristics of actual security events while being safely generated and controlled, enabling continuous testing without exposing the system to real threats
2Reliability
If continuous integrity checks are performed using synthetic events, then alerting pipeline integrity is improved, but processing time increases
Solution Approach 1:
Synthetic events are injected into the alerting pipeline at periodic intervals rather than continuously, allowing the system to perform validation checks at regular cadences. This periodic approach maintains pipeline integrity monitoring while avoiding constant processing overhead that would significantly impact system performance
Solution Approach 2:
The system performs validation using a subset of synthetic events targeting specific detection rules rather than exhaustively testing every rule continuously. This partial action approach provides sufficient integrity verification to maintain reliability while minimizing the time consumption associated with comprehensive continuous testing
Data Source
AI summary
A system for testing an alerting pipeline of a security network can include a synthetics computing device, a network analysis computing device, and an alerting computing device. The synthetics computing device can generate a synthetic event, a non-malicious version of an actual security event, to test one or more detection signatures of the security network and inject the synthetic event into a network log of events. The network analysis computing device can scan the network log of events, identify an event that triggers a detection signature of the security network, identify the event as the injected synthetic event, and generate a notification identifying the synthetic event and an associated detection signature triggered in response to the injected synthetic event. The alerting computing device can receive the notification and flag the synthetic event. The synthetics computing device can also validate the flagged synthetic event.