Pillar 1 v1.1 (shipped earlier) flagged benign browsing bursts as
beaconing: on short captures, grid periods longer than the observed
span never complete a cycle, so significance saturates to 1 and the
score sticks at exactly 0.5. v1.2 caps the grid at a third of the
observed span, requires a minimum number of completed cycles, and
excludes protocols that are periodic by nature (NTP, DNS, mDNS,
ICMP). Validated against 300 seeds per scenario: false positives on
bursty traffic drop from the 290-300/300 that v1.1 produced to 0/300,
with every beacon-detection scenario scoring unchanged.
Add Pillar 2 (persistent/long-lived sessions, with Zeek's fragmented
TCP sessions rejoined after a 5-minute gap), Pillar 3 (DNS tunneling
via Shannon-entropy information volume per subdomain per hour; the
Jensen-Shannon divergence was measured and does not separate tunnels
from benign CDN subdomains, so it stays in the evidence at zero
weight instead of in the score), and Pillar 4 (deterministic
noisy-OR fusion across the three pillars).
The fusion formula was validated against 8 labeled real-traffic
vectors (IoT-23, CTU-Normal) with tolerance <= 1e-4. A known
limitation is kept, not hidden: a benign Philips HUE bulb's strict
periodic polling and a 21.9h session score it above three real C2
hosts. No weight or threshold was tuned to mask this; it is
documented in the architecture docs instead.
Also fixes real bugs found along the way: ingest_dir's partition
count summed file names instead of distinct dates, DuckDB errors
were counted as bad rows, /api/alerts always returned an empty list
regardless of the last analysis, and the dashboard still claimed
every pillar was unimplemented.
Restores four design corrections that were missing from
docs/architecture.md (KL to Jensen-Shannon, the persistent-session
detector, the JA4 licensing boundary, and deterministic reduction
order), and catalogs the public datasets used for validation
(IoT-23, CTU-Normal, Mendeley DTQBC) with their licenses and SHA-256
checksums under research/validation/.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VAyr8d7HuAdUGB6aA5xmDD
Acaua is a collective SOC daemon consuming only Zeek log files, not a
single-user tool needing local hardware like its siblings. Drop the
Tauri desktop shell, installers and self-update entirely; the server
and its web dashboard ship as a container, updated by pulling a new
image tag.
Link against the official prebuilt libduckdb instead of compiling it
from source via the bundled feature, cutting image build time from
15+ minutes to about 3. Fix a real bug found along the way: as PID 1
in a container, the daemon ignored SIGTERM and was always killed
after the stop timeout; it now shuts down gracefully.
Also corrects the Pillar 1 beaconing score: the period estimate had a
harmonic alias (a perfectly periodic 4h series resolved to 600s), and
the old score formula flagged pure random traffic as suspicious
(p95 = 0.839 on Poisson noise). The new formula was validated against
300 samples per scenario.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VAyr8d7HuAdUGB6aA5xmDD
