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Filters: Author is Sushil Jajodia  [Clear All Filters]
2019-09-12
Prakruthi Karuna, Hemant Purohit, Rajesh Ganesan, Sushil Jajodia.  2018.  Generating Hard to Comprehend Fake Documents for Defensive Cyber Deception. IEEE Xplore Digital Library. 33(5):16-25.

Existing approaches to cyber defense have been inadequate at defending the targets from advanced persistent threats (APTs). APTs are stealthy and orchestrated attacks, which target both corporations and governments to exfiltrate important data. In this paper, we present a novel comprehensibility manipulation framework (CMF) to generate a haystack of hard to comprehend fake documents, which can be used for deceiving attackers and increasing the cost of data exfiltration by wasting their time and resources. CMF requires an original document as input and generates fake documents that are both believable and readable for the attacker, possess no important information, and are hard to comprehend. To evaluate CMF, we experimented with college aptitude tests and compared the performance of many readers on separate reading comprehension exercises with fake and original content. Our results showed a statistically significant difference in the correct responses to the same questions across the fake and original exercises, thus validating the effectiveness of CMF operations to mislead.

Tanmoy Chakraborty, Sushil Jajodia, Jonathan Katz, Antonio Picariello, Giancarlo Sperli, V. S. Subrahmanian.  2019.  FORGE: A Fake Online Repository Generation Engine for Cyber Deception. IEEE.

Today, major corporations and government organizations must face the reality that they will be hacked by malicious actors. In this paper, we consider the case of defending enterprises that have been successfully hacked by imposing additional a posteriori costs on the attacker. Our idea is simple: for every real document d, we develop methods to automatically generate a set Fake(d) of fake documents that are very similar to d. The attacker who steals documents must wade through a large number of documents in detail in order to separate the real one from the fakes. Our FORGE system focuses on technical documents (e.g. engineering/design documents) and involves three major innovations. First, we represent the semantic content of documents via multi-layer graphs (MLGs). Second, we propose a novel concept of “meta-centrality” for multi-layer graphs. Our third innovation is to show that the problem of generating the set Fake(d) of fakes can be viewed as an optimization problem. We prove that this problem is NP-complete and then develop efficient heuristics to solve it in practice. We ran detailed experiments with a panel of 20 human subjects and show that FORGE generates highly believable fakes.