A Proactive Decoy Selection Scheme for Cyber Deception using MITRE ATT&CK

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Zambianco, Marco, Facchinetti, Claudio, Siracusa, Domenico
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Zambianco, Marco
Facchinetti, Claudio
Siracusa, Domenico
author_facet Zambianco, Marco
Facchinetti, Claudio
Siracusa, Domenico
contents Cyber deception allows compensating the late response of defenders countermeasures to the ever evolving tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) of attackers. This proactive defense strategy employs decoys resembling legitimate system components to lure stealthy attackers within the defender environment, slowing and/or denying the accomplishment of their goals. In this regard, the selection of decoys that can expose the techniques used by malicious users plays a central role to incentivize their engagement. However, this is a difficult task to achieve in practice, since it requires an accurate and realistic modeling of the attacker capabilities and his possible targets. In this work, we tackle this challenge and we design a decoy selection scheme that is supported by an adversarial modeling based on empirical observation of real-world attackers. We take advantage of a domain-specific threat modelling language using MITRE ATT&CK framework as source of attacker TTPs targeting enterprise systems. In detail, we extract the information about the execution preconditions of each technique as well as its possible effects on the environment to generate attack graphs modeling the adversary capabilities. Based on this, we formulate a graph partition problem that minimizes the number of decoys detecting a corresponding number of techniques employed in various attack paths directed to specific targets. We compare our optimization-based decoy selection approach against several benchmark schemes that ignore the preconditions between the various attack steps. Results reveal that the proposed scheme provides the highest interception rate of attack paths using the lowest amount of decoys.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_12783
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Proactive Decoy Selection Scheme for Cyber Deception using MITRE ATT&CK
Zambianco, Marco
Facchinetti, Claudio
Siracusa, Domenico
Cryptography and Security
Cyber deception allows compensating the late response of defenders countermeasures to the ever evolving tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) of attackers. This proactive defense strategy employs decoys resembling legitimate system components to lure stealthy attackers within the defender environment, slowing and/or denying the accomplishment of their goals. In this regard, the selection of decoys that can expose the techniques used by malicious users plays a central role to incentivize their engagement. However, this is a difficult task to achieve in practice, since it requires an accurate and realistic modeling of the attacker capabilities and his possible targets. In this work, we tackle this challenge and we design a decoy selection scheme that is supported by an adversarial modeling based on empirical observation of real-world attackers. We take advantage of a domain-specific threat modelling language using MITRE ATT&CK framework as source of attacker TTPs targeting enterprise systems. In detail, we extract the information about the execution preconditions of each technique as well as its possible effects on the environment to generate attack graphs modeling the adversary capabilities. Based on this, we formulate a graph partition problem that minimizes the number of decoys detecting a corresponding number of techniques employed in various attack paths directed to specific targets. We compare our optimization-based decoy selection approach against several benchmark schemes that ignore the preconditions between the various attack steps. Results reveal that the proposed scheme provides the highest interception rate of attack paths using the lowest amount of decoys.
title A Proactive Decoy Selection Scheme for Cyber Deception using MITRE ATT&CK
topic Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.12783