Chuanpu Fu (Tsinghua University), Qi Li (Tsinghua University), Ke Xu (Tsinghua University)

Nowadays traffic on the Internet has been widely encrypted to protect its confidentiality and privacy. However, traffic encryption is always abused by attackers to conceal their malicious behaviors. Since the encrypted malicious traffic has similar features to benign flows, it can easily evade traditional detection methods. Particularly, the existing encrypted malicious traffic detection methods are supervised and they rely on the prior knowledge of known attacks (e.g., labeled datasets). Detecting unknown encrypted malicious traffic in real time, which does not require prior domain knowledge, is still an open problem.

In this paper, we propose HyperVision, a realtime unsupervised machine learning (ML) based malicious traffic detection system. Particularly, HyperVision is able to detect unknown patterns of encrypted malicious traffic by utilizing a compact inmemory graph built upon the traffic patterns. The graph captures flow interaction patterns represented by the graph structural features, instead of the features of specific known attacks. We develop an unsupervised graph learning method to detect abnormal interaction patterns by analyzing the connectivity, sparsity, and statistical features of the graph, which allows HyperVision to detect various encrypted attack traffic without requiring any labeled datasets of known attacks. Moreover, we establish an information theory model to demonstrate that the information preserved by the graph approaches the ideal theoretical bound. We show the performance of HyperVision by real-world experiments with 92 datasets including 48 attacks with encrypted malicious traffic. The experimental results illustrate that HyperVision achieves at least 0.92 AUC and 0.86 F1, which significantly outperform the state-of-the-art methods. In particular, more than 50% attacks in our experiments can evade all these methods. Moreover, HyperVision achieves at least 80.6 Gb/s detection throughput with the average detection latency of 0.83s.

View More Papers

Copy-on-Flip: Hardening ECC Memory Against Rowhammer Attacks

Andrea Di Dio (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), Koen Koning (Intel), Herbert Bos (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), Cristiano Giuffrida (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)

Read More

Measuring Messengers: Analyzing Infrastructures and Message Timings to Extract...

Theodor Schnitzler (Research Center Trustworthy Data Science and Security, TU Dortmund, and Ruhr-Universität Bochum)

Read More

Post-GDPR Threat Hunting on Android Phones: Dissecting OS-level Safeguards...

Mark Huasong Meng (National University of Singapore), Qing Zhang (ByteDance), Guangshuai Xia (ByteDance), Yuwei Zheng (ByteDance), Yanjun Zhang (The University of Queensland), Guangdong Bai (The University of Queensland), Zhi Liu (ByteDance), Sin G. Teo (Agency for Science, Technology and Research), Jin Song Dong (National University of Singapore)

Read More

StealthyIMU: Stealing Permission-protected Private Information From Smartphone Voice Assistant...

Ke Sun (University of California San Diego), Chunyu Xia (University of California San Diego), Songlin Xu (University of California San Diego), Xinyu Zhang (University of California San Diego)

Read More