Eagle: User profile-based anomaly detection for securing Hadoop clusters

Existing Big data analytics platforms, such as Hadoop, lack support for user activity monitoring. Several diagnostic tools such as Ganglia, Ambari, and Cloudera Manager are available to monitor health of a cluster, however, they do not provide algorithms to detect security threats or perform user activity monitoring. Hence, there is a need to develop a scalable system that can detect malicious user activities, especially in real-time, so that appropriate actions can be taken against the user. At eBay, we developed such a system named Eagle, which collects audit logs from Hadoop clusters and applications running on them, analyzes users behavior, generates profiles per user of the system, and predicts anomalous user activities based on their prior profiles. Eagle is a highly scalable system, capable of monitoring multiple eBay clusters in real-time. It includes machine-learning algorithms that create user profiles based on the user's history of activities. As far as we know, this is the first activity monitoring system on the Hadoop-ecosystem for the detection of intrusion-related activities using behavior-based profiles of users. When a user performs any operation in the cluster, Eagle matches current user action against his prior activity pattern and raises alarm if it suspects anomalous action. We investigate two machine-learning algorithms: density estimation, and principal component analysis (PCA). In this paper, we introduce the Eagle system, discuss the algorithms in detail, and show performance results. We demonstrate that the sensitivity of the density estimation algorithm is 93%, however the sensitivity of our system increases by 4.94% (on average) to 98% (approximately) by using an ensemble of the two algorithms during anomaly detection.