Biblio

With an increase in targeted attacks such as advanced persistent threats (APTs), enterprise system defenders require comprehensive frameworks that allow them to collaborate and evaluate their defense systems against such attacks. MITRE has developed a framework which includes a database of different kill-chains, tactics, techniques, and procedures that attackers employ to perform these attacks. In this work, we leverage natural language processing techniques to extract attacker actions from threat report documents generated by different organizations and automatically classify them into standardized tactics and techniques, while providing relevant mitigation advisories for each attack. A naïve method to achieve this is by training a machine learning model to predict labels that associate the reports with relevant categories. In practice, however, sufficient labeled data for model training is not always readily available, so that training and test data come from different sources, resulting in bias. A naïve model would typically underperform in such a situation. We address this major challenge by incorporating an importance weighting scheme called bias correction that efficiently utilizes available labeled data, given threat reports, whose categories are to be automatically predicted. We empirically evaluated our approach on 18,257 real-world threat reports generated between year 2000 and 2018 from various computer security organizations to demonstrate its superiority by comparing its performance with an existing approach.

This paper describes the various malware datasets that we have obtained permissions to host at the University of Arizona as part of a National Science Foundation funded project. It also describes some other malware datasets that we are in the process of obtaining permissions to host at the University of Arizona. We have also discussed some preliminary work we have carried out on malware analysis using big data platforms.

This paper describes a data driven approach to studying the science of cyber security (SoS). It argues that science is driven by data. It then describes issues and approaches towards the following three aspects: (i) Data Driven Science for Attack Detection and Mitigation, (ii) Foundations for Data Trustworthiness and Policy-based Sharing, and (iii) A Risk-based Approach to Security Metrics. We believe that the three aspects addressed in this paper will form the basis for studying the Science of Cyber Security.

Language vector space models (VSMs) have recently proven to be effective across a variety of tasks. In VSMs, each word in a corpus is represented as a real-valued vector. These vectors can be used as features in many applications in machine learning and natural language processing. In this paper, we study the effect of vector space representations in cyber security. In particular, we consider a passive traffic analysis attack (Website Fingerprinting) that threatens users' navigation privacy on the web. By using anonymous communication, Internet users (such as online activists) may wish to hide the destination of web pages they access for different reasons such as avoiding tyrant governments. Traditional website fingerprinting studies collect packets from the users' network and extract features that are used by machine learning techniques to reveal the destination of certain web pages. In this work, we propose the packet to vector (P2V) approach where we model website fingerprinting attack using word vector representations. We show how the suggested model outperforms previous website fingerprinting works.