US Patent 9866573 Dynamic malicious application detection in storage systems

Improved techniques involve comparing access patterns in a storage system to expected access patterns under similar circumstances. An intrusion detection system, in response to a suspected malicious application workload, collects information about a current session on the storage processor, e.g., application workload s running, users logged in, and timestamp, as well as parameters such as storage allocation requests sampled at prespecified intervals over a period of time. In a database that stores such sampled parameter values by application workload, user, and time, the system extracts the sampled parameter values having the application workload, user, and time corresponding to the current session. The system then compares the extracted sampled parameter values with the current parameter values and computes a difference. Based on the difference, the system determines whether the storage system is accessed by a malicious application workload.