arXiv subjects

Matt Bishop

Publications and source records attributed to Matt Bishop.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2021

A new method for flow-based network intrusion detection using the inverse Potts model

Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) play an important role as tools for identifying potential network threats. In the context of ever-increasing traffic volume on computer networks, flow-based NIDS arise as good solutions for real-time traffic classification. In recent years, different flow-based classifiers have been proposed using Machine Learning (ML) algorithms. Nevertheless, classical ML-based classifiers have some limitations. For instance, they require large amounts of labeled data for training, which might be difficult to obtain. Additionally, most ML-based classifiers are not capable of domain adaptation, i.e. after being trained on an specific data distribution, they are not general enough to be applied to other related data distributions. And, finally, many of the models inferred by these algorithms are black boxes, which do not provide explainable results. To overcome these limitations, we propose a new algorithm, called Energy-based Flow Classifier (EFC). This anomaly-based classifier uses inverse statistics to infer a statistical model based on labeled benign examples. We show that EFC is capable of accurately performing binary flow classification and is more adaptable to different data distributions than classical ML-based classifiers. Given the positive results obtained on three different datasets (CIDDS-001, CICIDS17 and CICDDoS19), we consider EFC to be a promising algorithm to perform robust flow-based traffic classification.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2020

A Praise for Defensive Programming: Leveraging Uncertainty for Effective Malware Mitigation

A promising avenue for improving the effectiveness of behavioral-based malware detectors would be to combine fast traditional machine learning detectors with high-accuracy, but time-consuming deep learning models. The main idea would be to place software receiving borderline classifications by traditional machine learning methods in an environment where uncertainty is added, while software is analyzed by more time-consuming deep learning models. The goal of uncertainty would be to rate-limit actions of potential malware during the time consuming deep analysis. In this paper, we present a detailed description of the analysis and implementation of CHAMELEON, a framework for realizing this uncertain environment for Linux. CHAMELEON offers two environments for software: (i) standard - for any software identified as benign by conventional machine learning methods and (ii) uncertain - for software receiving borderline classifications when analyzed by these conventional machine learning methods. The uncertain environment adds obstacles to software execution through random perturbations applied probabilistically on selected system calls. We evaluated CHAMELEON with 113 applications and 100 malware samples for Linux. Our results showed that at threshold 10%, intrusive and non-intrusive strategies caused approximately 65% of malware to fail accomplishing their tasks, while approximately 30% of the analyzed benign software to meet with various levels of disruption. With a dynamic, per-system call threshold, CHAMELEON caused 92% of the malware to fail, and only 10% of the benign software to be disrupted. We also found that I/O-bound software was three times more affected by uncertainty than CPU-bound software. Further, we analyzed the logs of software crashed with non-intrusive strategies, and found that some crashes are due to the software bugs.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2017

LeakSemantic: Identifying Abnormal Sensitive Network Transmissions in Mobile Applications

Mobile applications (apps) often transmit sensitive data through network with various intentions. Some transmissions are needed to fulfill the app's functionalities. However, transmissions with malicious receivers may lead to privacy leakage and tend to behave stealthily to evade detection. The problem is twofold: how does one unveil sensitive transmissions in mobile apps, and given a sensitive transmission, how does one determine if it is legitimate? In this paper, we propose LeakSemantic, a framework that can automatically locate abnormal sensitive network transmissions from mobile apps. LeakSemantic consists of a hybrid program analysis component and a machine learning component. Our program analysis component combines static analysis and dynamic analysis to precisely identify sensitive transmissions. Compared to existing taint analysis approaches, LeakSemantic achieves better accuracy with fewer false positives and is able to collect runtime data such as network traffic for each transmission. Based on features derived from the runtime data, machine learning classifiers are built to further differentiate between the legal and illegal disclosures. Experiments show that LeakSemantic achieves 91% accuracy on 2279 sensitive connections from 1404 apps.

cs.CR↗