Junjie Liang (The Pennsylvania State University), Wenbo Guo (The Pennsylvania State University), Tongbo Luo (Robinhood), Vasant Honavar (The Pennsylvania State University), Gang Wang (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Xinyu Xing (The Pennsylvania State University)

Supervised machine learning classifiers have been widely used for attack detection, but their training requires abundant high-quality labels. Unfortunately, high-quality labels are difficult to obtain in practice due to the high cost of data labeling and the constant evolution of attackers. Without such labels, it is challenging to train and deploy targeted countermeasures.

In this paper, we propose FARE, a clustering method to enable fine-grained attack categorization under low-quality labels. We focus on two common issues in data labels: 1) missing labels for certain attack classes or families; and 2) only having coarse-grained labels available for different attack types. The core idea of FARE is to take full advantage of the limited labels while using the underlying data distribution to consolidate the low-quality labels. We design an ensemble model to fuse the results of multiple unsupervised learning algorithms with the given labels to mitigate the negative impact of missing classes and coarse-grained labels. We then train an input transformation network to map the input data into a low-dimensional latent space for fine-grained clustering. Using two security datasets (Android malware and network intrusion traces), we show that FARE significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art (semi-)supervised learning methods in clustering quality/correctness. Further, we perform an initial deployment of FARE by working with a large e-commerce service to detect fraudulent accounts. With real-world A/B tests and manual investigation, we demonstrate the effectiveness of FARE to catch previously-unseen frauds.

View More Papers

Dinosaur Resurrection: PowerPC Binary Patching for Base Station Analysis

Uwe Muller, Eicke Hauck, Timm Welz, Jiska Classen, Matthias Hollick (Secure Mobile Networking Lab, TU Darmstadt)

Read More

Ovid: Message-based Automatic Contact Tracing

Leonie Reichert and Samuel Brack (Humboldt University of Berlin); Björn Scheuermann (Humboldt-University of Berlin)

Read More

From Library Portability to Para-rehosting: Natively Executing Microcontroller Software...

Wenqiang Li (State Key Laboratory of Information Security, Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences; Department of Computer Science, the University of Georgia, USA; School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences; Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, the University of Kansas, USA), Le Guan (Department of Computer Science, the University…

Read More

FlowLens: Enabling Efficient Flow Classification for ML-based Network Security...

Diogo Barradas (INESC-ID, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa), Nuno Santos (INESC-ID, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa), Luis Rodrigues (INESC-ID, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa), Salvatore Signorello (LASIGE, Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade de Lisboa), Fernando M. V. Ramos (INESC-ID, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa), André Madeira (INESC-ID, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de…

Read More