A digital evidence fusion method in network forensics systems with Dempster-shafer theory

Network intrusion forensics is an important extension to present security infrastructure, and is becoming the focus of forensics research field. However, comparison with sophisticated multi-stage attacks and volume of sensor data, current practices in network forensic analysis are to manually examine, an error prone, labor-intensive and time consuming process. To solve these problems, in this paper we propose a digital evidence fusion method for network forensics with Dempster-Shafer theory that can detect efficiently computer crime in networked environments, and fuse digital evidence from different sources such as hosts and sub-networks automatically. In the end, we evaluate the method on well-known KDD Cup 1999 dataset. The results prove our method is very effective for real-time network forensics, and can provide comprehensible messages for a forensic investigators.