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arXiv · 1507.01922

Cyber-Deception and Attribution in Capture-the-Flag Exercises

Eric Nunes·Nimish Kulkarni·Paulo Shakarian·Andrew Ruef·Jay Little
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Abstract

Attributing the culprit of a cyber-attack is widely considered one of the major technical and policy challenges of cyber-security. The lack of ground truth for an individual responsible for a given attack has limited previous studies. Here, we overcome this limitation by leveraging DEFCON capture-the-flag (CTF) exercise data where the actual ground-truth is known. In this work, we use various classification techniques to identify the culprit in a cyberattack and find that deceptive activities account for the majority of misclassified samples. We also explore several heuristics to alleviate some of the misclassification caused by deception.

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Eric Nunes, Nimish Kulkarni, Paulo Shakarian, Andrew Ruef, Jay Little. 2015-07-07. Cyber-Deception and Attribution in Capture-the-Flag Exercises. https://arxiv.org/abs/1507.01922

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