Maintaining security and privacy in real-world enterprise networks is becoming more and more challenging. Cyber actors are increasingly employing previously unreported and state-of-the-art techniques to break into corporate networks. To develop novel and effective methods to thwart these sophisticated cyberattacks, we need datasets that reflect real-world enterprise scenarios to a high degree of accuracy. However, precious few such datasets are publicly available. Researchers still predominantly use the decade-old KDD datasets, however, studies showed that these datasets do not adequately reflect modern attacks like Advanced Persistent Threats(APT). In this work, we analyze the usefulness of the recently introduced DARPA Operationally Transparent Cyber (OpTC) dataset in this regard. We describe the content of the dataset in detail and present a qualitative analysis. We show that the OpTC dataset is an excellent candidate for advanced cyber threat detection research while also highlighting its limitations. Additionally, we propose several research directions where this dataset can be useful.
SoK: DARPA's AI Cyber Challenge (AIxCC): Competition Design, Architectures, and Lessons Learned
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Texas A&M University（德克萨斯大学）；Smart Information Flow Technologies (SIFT)（智能信息流技术公司）；Kudu Dynamics（Kudu动态公司）；Microsoft（微软）
Laboratory for Advanced Cybersecurity Research（高级网络安全研究实验室）；National Security Agency（国家安全局）
Rule-based IDS (intrusion detection systems) are being replaced by more robust neural IDS, which demonstrate great potential in the field of Cybersecurity. However, these ML approaches continue to rely on ad-hoc feature engineering techniques, which lack the capacity to vectorize inputs in ways that are fully relevant to the discovery of anomalous cyber activity. We propose a deep end-to-end framework with NLP-inspired components for identifying potentially malicious behaviors on enterprise computer networks. We also demonstrate the efficacy of this technique on the recently released DARPA OpT…
Digital Technology National Research Council Canada（加拿大国家研究委员会数字技术研究所）
APT, known as Advanced Persistent Threat, is a difficult challenge for cyber defence. These threats make many traditional defences ineffective as the vulnerabilities exploited by these threats are insiders who have access to and are within the network. This paper proposes DeepTaskAPT, a heterogeneous task-tree based deep learning method to construct a baseline model based on sequences of tasks using a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural network that can be applied across different users to identify anomalous behaviour. Rather than applying the model to sequential log entries directly, as most…
This paper uses network packet capture data to demonstrate how Robust Principal Component Analysis (RPCA) can be used in a new way to detect anomalies which serve as cyber-network attack indicators. The approach requires only a few parameters to be learned using partitioned training data and shows promise of ameliorating the need for an exhaustive set of examples of different types of network attacks. For Lincoln Lab's DARPA intrusion detection data set, the method achieves low false-positive rates while maintaining reasonable true-positive rates on individual packets. In addition, the method …
The development of machine learning algorithms in the cyber security domain has been impeded by the complex, hierarchical, sequential and multimodal nature of the data involved. In this paper we introduce the notion of a streaming tree as a generic data structure encompassing a large portion of real-world cyber security data. Starting from host-based event logs we represent computer processes as streaming trees that evolve in continuous time. Leveraging the properties of the signature kernel, a machine learning tool that recently emerged as a leading technology for learning with complex sequen…
National Research Council（加拿大国家研究委员会）；Tutte Institute for Mathematics and Computing（塔特数学与计算研究所）
We present ANUBIS, a highly effective machine learning-based APT detection system. Our design philosophy for ANUBIS involves two principal components. Firstly, we intend ANUBIS to be effectively utilized by cyber-response teams. Therefore, prediction explainability is one of the main focuses of ANUBIS design. Secondly, ANUBIS uses system provenance graphs to capture causality and thereby achieve high detection performance. At the core of the predictive capability of ANUBIS, there is a Bayesian Neural Network that can tell how confident it is in its predictions. We evaluate ANUBIS against a rec…
Feature selection is an indispensable preprocessing step when mining huge datasets that can significantly improve the overall system performance. Therefore in this paper we focus on a hybrid approach of feature selection. This method falls into two phases. The filter phase select the features with highest information gain and guides the initialization of search process for wrapper phase whose output the final feature subset. The final feature subsets are passed through the Knearest neighbor classifier for classification of attacks. The effectiveness of this algorithm is demonstrated on DARPA K…
This paper presents a demo of our Security Toolbox to detect novel malware in Android apps. This Toolbox is developed through our recent research project funded by the DARPA Automated Program Analysis for Cybersecurity (APAC) project. The adversarial challenge ("Red") teams in the DARPA APAC program are tasked with designing sophisticated malware to test the bounds of malware detection technology being developed by the research and development ("Blue") teams. Our research group, a Blue team in the DARPA APAC program, proposed a "human-in-the-loop program analysis" approach to detect malware gi…
With the success of the Cyber Grand Challenge (CGC) sponsored by DARPA, the topic of Autonomous Cyber Reasoning System (CRS) has recently attracted extensive attention from both industry and academia. Utilizing automated system to detect, exploit and patch software vulnerabilities seems so attractive because of its scalability and cost-efficiency compared with the human expert based solution. In this paper, we give an extensive survey of former representative works related to the underlying technologies of a CRS, including vulnerability detection, exploitation and patching. As an important sup…
Cyber threat intelligence (CTI) is being used to search for indicators of attacks that might have compromised an enterprise network for a long time without being discovered. To have a more effective analysis, CTI open standards have incorporated descriptive relationships showing how the indicators or observables are related to each other. However, these relationships are either completely overlooked in information gathering or not used for threat hunting. In this paper, we propose a system, called POIROT, which uses these correlations to uncover the steps of a successful attack campaign. We us…
The knowledge on attacks contained in Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) reports is very important to effectively identify and quickly respond to cyber threats. However, this knowledge is often embedded in large amounts of text, and therefore difficult to use effectively. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach and tool called EXTRACTOR that allows precise automatic extraction of concise attack behaviors from CTI reports. EXTRACTOR makes no strong assumptions about the text and is capable of extracting attack behaviors as provenance graphs from unstructured text. We evaluate EXTRAC…
Howard University（霍华德大学）；African Institute for Mathematical Sciences（非洲数学科学研究所）
With the growing rates of cyber-attacks and cyber espionage, the need for better and more powerful intrusion detection systems (IDS) is even more warranted nowadays. The basic task of an IDS is to act as the first line of defense, in detecting attacks on the internet. As intrusion tactics from intruders become more sophisticated and difficult to detect, researchers have started to apply novel Machine Learning (ML) techniques to effectively detect intruders and hence preserve internet users' information and overall trust in the entire internet network security. Over the last decade, there has b…
The University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；New York University（纽约大学）；King’s College London（伦敦国王学院）；University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学）；The Alan Turing Institute（阿兰·图灵研究所）；Université du Québec à Montréal（魁北克大学蒙特利尔分校）
Advanced persistent threats (APT) are stealthy cyber-attacks that are aimed at stealing valuable information from target organizations and tend to extend in time. Blocking all APTs is impossible, security experts caution, hence the importance of research on early detection and damage limitation. Whole-system provenance-tracking and provenance trace mining are considered promising as they can help find causal relationships between activities and flag suspicious event sequences as they occur. We introduce an unsupervised method that exploits OS-independent features reflecting process activity to…
With the progressive increase of network application and electronic devices (computers, mobile phones, android, etc.) attack and intrusion, detection has become a very challenging task in cybercrime detection area. in this context, most of the existing approaches of attack detection rely mainly on a finite set of attacks. These solutions are vulnerable, that is, they fail in detecting some attacks when sources of informations are ambiguous or imperfect. However, few approaches started investigating in this direction. This paper investigates the role of machine learning approach (ANN, SVM) in d…
Refining Decision Boundaries In Anomaly Detection Using Similarity Search Within the Feature Space
New York University, NYUAD, Division of Science, Computer Science Department（纽约大学）；University of Quebec in Montreal, Computer Science Department, Montreal（魁北克大学蒙特利尔分校）；University of Edinburgh, School of Informatics, Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）
Semantic-Aware Advanced Persistent Threat Detection Using Autoencoders on LLM-Encoded System Logs
Faculty of Artificial Intelligence and Engineering, Multimedia University Cyberjaya, Malaysia（人工智能与工程学院，多媒体大学（Cyberjaya校区））；Centre for Image and Vision Computing, Centre of Excellence for Artificial Intelligence, Faculty of Artificial Intelligence and Engineering, Multimedia University, Cyberjaya, Selangor, Malaysia（图像与视觉计算中心，人工智能卓越中心，人工智能与工程学院，多媒体大学（Cyberjaya校区，Selangor州））；Computer Science, New York University Abu Dhabi, UAE（计算机科学，纽约大学阿布扎克校区）
