TREC: APT Tactic / Technique Recognition via Few-Shot Provenance Subgraph Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Lv, Mingqi, Gao, HongZhe, Qiu, Xuebo, Chen, Tieming, Zhu, Tiantian, Chen, Jinyin, Ji, Shouling
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Lv, Mingqi
Gao, HongZhe
Qiu, Xuebo
Chen, Tieming
Zhu, Tiantian
Chen, Jinyin
Ji, Shouling
author_facet Lv, Mingqi
Gao, HongZhe
Qiu, Xuebo
Chen, Tieming
Zhu, Tiantian
Chen, Jinyin
Ji, Shouling
contents APT (Advanced Persistent Threat) with the characteristics of persistence, stealth, and diversity is one of the greatest threats against cyber-infrastructure. As a countermeasure, existing studies leverage provenance graphs to capture the complex relations between system entities in a host for effective APT detection. In addition to detecting single attack events as most existing work does, understanding the tactics / techniques (e.g., Kill-Chain, ATT&CK) applied to organize and accomplish the APT attack campaign is more important for security operations. Existing studies try to manually design a set of rules to map low-level system events to high-level APT tactics / techniques. However, the rule based methods are coarse-grained and lack generalization ability, thus they can only recognize APT tactics and cannot identify fine-grained APT techniques and mutant APT attacks. In this paper, we propose TREC, the first attempt to recognize APT tactics / techniques from provenance graphs by exploiting deep learning techniques. To address the "needle in a haystack" problem, TREC segments small and compact subgraphs covering individual APT technique instances from a large provenance graph based on a malicious node detection model and a subgraph sampling algorithm. To address the "training sample scarcity" problem, TREC trains the APT tactic / technique recognition model in a few-shot learning manner by adopting a Siamese neural network. We evaluate TREC based on a customized dataset collected and made public by our team. The experiment results show that TREC significantly outperforms state-of-the-art systems in APT tactic recognition and TREC can also effectively identify APT techniques.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_15147
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle TREC: APT Tactic / Technique Recognition via Few-Shot Provenance Subgraph Learning
Lv, Mingqi
Gao, HongZhe
Qiu, Xuebo
Chen, Tieming
Zhu, Tiantian
Chen, Jinyin
Ji, Shouling
Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
APT (Advanced Persistent Threat) with the characteristics of persistence, stealth, and diversity is one of the greatest threats against cyber-infrastructure. As a countermeasure, existing studies leverage provenance graphs to capture the complex relations between system entities in a host for effective APT detection. In addition to detecting single attack events as most existing work does, understanding the tactics / techniques (e.g., Kill-Chain, ATT&CK) applied to organize and accomplish the APT attack campaign is more important for security operations. Existing studies try to manually design a set of rules to map low-level system events to high-level APT tactics / techniques. However, the rule based methods are coarse-grained and lack generalization ability, thus they can only recognize APT tactics and cannot identify fine-grained APT techniques and mutant APT attacks. In this paper, we propose TREC, the first attempt to recognize APT tactics / techniques from provenance graphs by exploiting deep learning techniques. To address the "needle in a haystack" problem, TREC segments small and compact subgraphs covering individual APT technique instances from a large provenance graph based on a malicious node detection model and a subgraph sampling algorithm. To address the "training sample scarcity" problem, TREC trains the APT tactic / technique recognition model in a few-shot learning manner by adopting a Siamese neural network. We evaluate TREC based on a customized dataset collected and made public by our team. The experiment results show that TREC significantly outperforms state-of-the-art systems in APT tactic recognition and TREC can also effectively identify APT techniques.
title TREC: APT Tactic / Technique Recognition via Few-Shot Provenance Subgraph Learning
topic Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.15147