Jun Zeng (National University of Singapore), Zheng Leong Chua (Independent Researcher), Yinfang Chen (National University of Singapore), Kaihang Ji (National University of Singapore), Zhenkai Liang (National University of Singapore), Jian Mao (Beihang University)

Endpoint monitoring solutions are widely deployed in today’s enterprise environments to support advanced attack detection and investigation. These monitors continuously record system-level activities as audit logs and provide deep visibility into security incidents. Unfortunately, to recognize behaviors of interest and detect potential threats, cyber analysts face a semantic gap between low-level audit events and high-level system behaviors. To bridge this gap, existing work largely matches streams of audit logs against a knowledge base of rules that describe behaviors. However, specifying such rules heavily relies on expert knowledge. In this paper, we present Watson, an automated approach to abstracting behaviors by inferring and aggregating the semantics of audit events. Watson uncovers the semantics of events through their usage context in audit logs. By extracting behaviors as connected system operations, Watson then combines event semantics as the representation of behaviors. To reduce analysis workload, Watson further clusters semantically similar behaviors and distinguishes the representatives for analyst investigation. In our evaluation against both benign and malicious behaviors, Watson exhibits high accuracy for behavior abstraction. Moreover, Watson can reduce analysis workload by two orders of magnitude for attack investigation.

View More Papers

PrivacyFlash Pro: Automating Privacy Policy Generation for Mobile Apps

Sebastian Zimmeck (Wesleyan University), Rafael Goldstein (Wesleyan University), David Baraka (Wesleyan University)

Read More

LaKSA: A Probabilistic Proof-of-Stake Protocol

Daniel Reijsbergen (Singapore University of Technology and Design), Pawel Szalachowski (Singapore University of Technology and Design), Junming Ke (University of Tartu), Zengpeng Li (Singapore University of Technology and Design), Jianying Zhou (Singapore University of Technology and Design)

Read More

WINNIE : Fuzzing Windows Applications with Harness Synthesis and...

Jinho Jung (Georgia Institute of Technology), Stephen Tong (Georgia Institute of Technology), Hong Hu (Pennsylvania State University), Jungwon Lim (Georgia Institute of Technology), Yonghwi Jin (Georgia Institute of Technology), Taesoo Kim (Georgia Institute of Technology)

Read More

Demo #1: Curricular Reinforcement Learning for Robust Policy in...

Yunzhe Tian, Yike Li, Yingxiao Xiang, Wenjia Niu, Endong Tong, and Jiqiang Liu (Beijing Jiaotong University)

Read More