The techniques and tactics used by cyber adversaries are becoming more sophisticated, ironically, as defense getting stronger and the cost of a breach continuing to rise. Understanding the thought processes and behaviors of adversaries is extremely challenging as high profile or even amateur attackers have no incentive to share the trades associated with their illegal activities. One opportunity to observe the actions the adversaries perform is through the use of Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) which generate alerts in the event that suspicious behavior was detected. The alerts raised by these systems typically describe the suspicious actions via the form of attack 'signature', which do not necessarily reveal the true intent of the attacker performing the action. Meanwhile, several high level frameworks exist to describe the sequence or chain of action types an adversary might perform. These frameworks, however, do not connect the action types to observables of standard intrusion detection systems, nor describing the plausible intents of the adversarial actions. To address these gaps, this work proposes the Action-Intent Framework (AIF) to complement existing Cyber Attack Kill Chains and Attack Taxonomies. The AIF defines a set of Action-Intent States (AIS) at two levels of description: the Macro-AIS describes 'what' the attacker is trying to achieve and the Micro-AIS describes "how" the intended goal is achieved. A full description of both the Macro is provided along with a set of guiding principals of how the AIS is derived and added to the framework.
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Institute for Network Sciences and Cyberspace, Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology, Tsinghua University（清华大学网络科学与网络空间研究院，北京信息科学与技术国家研究中心）
Learning-based Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDSs) are widely deployed for defending various cyberattacks. Existing learning-based NIDS mainly uses Neural Network (NN) as a classifier that relies on the quality and quantity of cyberattack data. Such NN-based approaches are also hard to interpret for improving efficiency and scalability. In this paper, we design a new local-global computation paradigm, FEDFOREST, a novel learning-based NIDS by combining the interpretable Gradient Boosting Decision Tree (GBDT) and Federated Learning (FL) framework. Specifically, FEDFOREST is composed of …
Federated Detection of Open Charge Point Protocol 1.6 Cyberattacks
Democritus University of Thrace（德谟克利特色雷斯大学）；Public Power Corporation S.A.（公共电力公司）；University of Western Macedonia（西马其顿大学）；Metamind Innovations IKE（Metamind创新有限公司）；Kingston University London（金史密斯伦敦大学）；Aristotle University of Thessaloniki（塞萨洛尼基亚里士多德大学）；SIDROCO Holdings Ltd（SIDROCO控股公司）
Intrusion detection has focused primarily on detecting cyberattacks at the event-level. Since there is such a large volume of network data and attacks are minimal, machine learning approaches have focused on improving accuracy and reducing false positives, but this has frequently resulted in overfitting. In addition, the volume of intrusion detection alerts is large and creates fatigue in the human analyst who must review them. This research addresses the problems associated with event-level intrusion detection and the large volumes of intrusion alerts by applying active learning and cyber sit…
Secure vehicular communication is a critical factor for secure traffic management. Effective security in intelligent transportation systems (ITS) requires effective and timely intrusion detection systems (IDS). In this paper, we consider false data injection attacks and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, especially the stealthy DDoS attacks, targeting the integrity and availability, respectively, in vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANET). Novel statistical intrusion detection and mitigation techniques based on centralized communications through roadside units (RSU) are proposed for the c…
Cybersecurity has become one of the focuses of organisations. The number of cyberattacks keeps increasing as Internet usage continues to grow. An intrusion detection system (IDS) is an alarm system that helps to detect cyberattacks. As new types of cyberattacks continue to emerge, researchers focus on developing machine learning (ML) based IDS to detect zero-day attacks. Researchers usually remove some or all attack samples from the training dataset and only include them in the testing dataset when evaluating the performance of an IDS on detecting zero-day attacks. Although this method may sho…
Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDSs) are widely regarded as efficient tools for securing in-vehicle networks against diverse cyberattacks. However, since cyberattacks are always evolving, signature-based intrusion detection systems are no longer adopted. An alternative solution can be the deployment of deep learning based intrusion detection system which play an important role in detecting unknown attack patterns in network traffic. Hence, in this paper, we compare the performance of different unsupervised deep and machine learning based anomaly detection algorithms, for real-time detec…
Collaborative Learning for Cyberattack Detection in Blockchain Networks
University of Technology Sydney (UTS)（悉尼科技大学）；Advanced Institute of Engineering and Technology (AVITECH)（先进工程技术学院）；University of Engineering and Technology, Vietnam National University, Hanoi（越南国家大学河内工程技术大学）；VNU Information Technology Institute（越南国家大学信息技术学院）
Critical and sophisticated cyberattacks often take multitudes of reconnaissance, exploitations, and obfuscation techniques to penetrate through well protected enterprise networks. The discovery and detection of attacks, though needing continuous efforts, is no longer sufficient. Security Operation Center (SOC) analysts are overwhelmed by the significant volume of intrusion alerts without being able to extract actionable intelligence. Recognizing this challenge, this paper describes the advances and findings through deploying ASSERT to process intrusion alerts from OmniSOC in collaboration with…
This paper studies the deployment of joint moving target defense (MTD) and deception against multi-stage cyberattacks. Given the system equipped with MTD that randomizes between different configurations, we investigate how to allocate a bounded number of sensors in each configuration to optimize the attack detection rate before the attacker achieves its objective. Specifically, two types of sensors are considered: intrusion detectors that are observable by the attacker and stealthy sensors that are not observable to the attacker. We propose a two-step optimization-based approach for allocating…
Attacks by Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) have been shown to be difficult to detect using traditional signature- and anomaly-based intrusion detection approaches. Deception techniques such as decoy objects, often called honey items, may be deployed for intrusion detection and attack analysis, providing an alternative to detect APT behaviours. This work explores the use of honey items to classify intrusion interactions, differentiating automated attacks from those which need some human reasoning and interaction towards APT detection. Multiple decoy items are deployed on honeypots in a virtu…
While the increasing penetration of information and communication technology into distribution grid brings numerous benefits, it also opens up a new threat landscape, particularly through cyberattacks. To provide a basis for countermeasures against such threats, this paper addresses the investigation of the impact and manifestations of cyberattacks on smart grids by replicating the power grid in a secure, isolated, and controlled laboratory environment as a cyber-physical twin. Currently, detecting intrusions by unauthorized third parties into the central monitoring and control system of grid …
Symantec Research Labs（赛门铁克研究实验室）；Boston University（波士顿大学）
Despite the fact that cyberattacks are constantly growing in complexity, the research community still lacks effective tools to easily monitor and understand them. In particular, there is a need for techniques that are able to not only track how prominently certain malicious actions, such as the exploitation of specific vulnerabilities, are exploited in the wild, but also (and more importantly) how these malicious actions factor in as attack steps in more complex cyberattacks. In this paper we present ATTACK2VEC, a system that uses temporal word embeddings to model how attack steps are exploite…
As connectivity between and within vehicles increases, so does concern about safety and security. Various automotive serial protocols are used inside vehicles such as Controller Area Network (CAN), Local Interconnect Network (LIN) and FlexRay. CAN bus is the most used in-vehicle network protocol to support exchange of vehicle parameters between Electronic Control Units (ECUs). This protocol lacks security mechanisms by design and is therefore vulnerable to various attacks. Furthermore, connectivity of vehicles has made the CAN bus not only vulnerable from within the vehicle but also from outsi…
Cybersecurity is a domain where the data distribution is constantly changing with attackers exploring newer patterns to attack cyber infrastructure. Intrusion detection system is one of the important layers in cyber safety in today's world. Machine learning based network intrusion detection systems started showing effective results in recent years. With deep learning models, detection rates of network intrusion detection system are improved. More accurate the model, more the complexity and hence less the interpretability. Deep neural networks are complex and hard to interpret which makes diffi…
Advancements in computer networks and communication technologies like software defined networks (SDN), Internet of things (IoT), microservices architecture, cloud computing and network function virtualization (NFV) have opened new fronts and challenges for security experts to combat against modern cyberattacks. Relying on perimeter defense and signature-based network security solutions like Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems (IDS/IPS) have failed to deliver adequate level of security against new attack vectors such as advance persistent threats, zero days, ransomware, botnets and other…
Cyberattacks are a major issues and it causes organizations great financial, and reputation harm. However, due to various factors, the current network intrusion detection systems (NIDS) seem to be insufficent. Predominant NIDS identifies Cyberattacks through a handcrafted dataset of rules. Although the recent applications of machine learning and deep learning have alleviated the enormous effort in NIDS, the security of network data has always been a prime concern. However, to encounter the security problem and enable sharing among organizations, Federated Learning (FL) scheme is employed. Alth…
BITS, Pilani, Goa（pilani 果阿校区）；Dept. of CS & IS, Goa Campus（果阿校区计算机科学与信息系统系）
The Intent in Android plays an important role in inter-process and intra-process communications. The implicit Intent that an application could accept are declared in its manifest and are amongst the easiest feature to extract from an apk. Implicit Intents could even be extracted online and in real-time. So far neither the feasibility of developing an Intrusion Detection System solely on implicit Intent has been explored, nor are any benchmarks available of a malware classifier that is based on implicit Intent alone. We demonstrate that despite Intent is implicit and well declared, it can provi…
