2019/01/03 by Zheyuan Ryan Shi, Aaron Schlenker, Shi, Zheyuan Ryan +13 · 1 voice
Computer Science · #Advanced Malware Detection Techniques #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Computer Science and Game Theory (cs.GT) #Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Information and Cyber Security #Network Security and Intrusion Detection #Social and Information Networks (cs.SI) #cs.AI #cs.CR #cs.GT #cs.SI
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1901.00586
IAAI-20, AICS-2020 Workshop
openalex publication_date 2019/01/03 · arxiv created 2019/11/19 · openalex created_date 2019/12/05 · arxiv updated 2020/02/19 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Cyber adversaries have increasingly leveraged social engineering attacks to breach large organizations and threaten the well-being of today's online users. One clever technique, the "watering hole" attack, compromises a legitimate website to execute drive-by download attacks by redirecting users to another malicious domain. We introduce a game-theoretic model that captures the salient aspects for an organization protecting itself from a watering hole attack by altering the environment information in web traffic so as to deceive the attackers. Our main contributions are (1) a novel Social Engineering Deception (SED) game model that features a continuous action set for the attacker, (2) an in-depth analysis of the SED model to identify computationally feasible real-world cases, and (3) the CyberTWEAK algorithm which solves for the optimal protection policy. To illustrate the potential use of our framework, we built a browser extension based on our algorithms which is now publicly available online. The CyberTWEAK extension will be vital to the continued development and deployment of countermeasures for social engineering.