Argumentation Models for Cyber Attribution

Eric Nunes; Paulo Shakarian; Gerardo I. Simari; Andrew Ruef

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arXiv · 1607.02171

Argumentation Models for Cyber Attribution

Eric Nunes·Paulo Shakarian·Gerardo I. Simari·Andrew Ruef

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Abstract

A major challenge in cyber-threat analysis is combining information from different sources to find the person or the group responsible for the cyber-attack. It is one of the most important technical and policy challenges in cyber-security. The lack of ground truth for an individual responsible for an attack has limited previous studies. In this paper, we take a first step towards overcoming this limitation by building a dataset from the capture-the-flag event held at DEFCON, and propose an argumentation model based on a formal reasoning framework called DeLP (Defeasible Logic Programming) designed to aid an analyst in attributing a cyber-attack. We build models from latent variables to reduce the search space of culprits (attackers), and show that this reduction significantly improves the performance of classification-based approaches from 37% to 62% in identifying the attacker.

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Eric Nunes, Paulo Shakarian, Gerardo I. Simari, Andrew Ruef. 2016-07-07. Argumentation Models for Cyber Attribution. https://arxiv.org/abs/1607.02171

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