STATL: An Attack Language for State-Based Intrusion Detection

STATL is an extensible state/transition-based attack description language designed to support intrusion detection. The language allows one to describe computer penetrations as sequences of actions that an attacker performs to compromise a computer system. A STATL description of an attack scenario can be used by an intrusion detection system to analyze a stream of events and detect possible ongoing intrusions. Since intrusion detection is performed in different domains (i.e., the network or the hosts) and in different operating environments (e.g., Linux, Solaris, or Windows NT), it is useful to have an extensible language that can be easily tailored to different target environments. STATL defines domain-independent features of attack scenarios and provides constructs for extending the language to describe attacks in particular domains and environments. The STATL language has been successfully used in describing both network-based and host-based attacks, and it has been tailored to very different environments, e.g., Sun Microsystems’ Solaris and Microsoft’s Windows NT. An implementation of the runtime support for the STATL language has been developed and a toolset of intrusion detection systems based on STATL has been implemented. The toolset was used in a recent intrusion detection evaluation effort, delivering very favorable results. This paper presents the details of the STATL syntax and its semantics. Real examples from both the host and network-based extensions of the language are also presented.