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arXiv · 2405.04758

Honeyfile Camouflage: Hiding Fake Files in Plain Sight

Roelien C. Timmer·David Liebowitz·Surya Nepal·Salil S. Kanhere
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Abstract

Honeyfiles are a particularly useful type of honeypot: fake files deployed to detect and infer information from malicious behaviour. This paper considers the challenge of naming honeyfiles so they are camouflaged when placed amongst real files in a file system. Based on cosine distances in semantic vector spaces, we develop two metrics for filename camouflage: one based on simple averaging and one on clustering with mixture fitting. We evaluate and compare the metrics, showing that both perform well on a publicly available GitHub software repository dataset.

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Roelien C. Timmer, David Liebowitz, Surya Nepal, Salil S. Kanhere. 2024-05-08. Honeyfile Camouflage: Hiding Fake Files in Plain Sight. https://doi.org/10.1145/3660354.3660355

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