Tiresias: predicting security events through deep learning
Files
Accepted manuscript
Date
2018
Authors
Shen, Yun
Mariconti, Enrico
Vervier, Pierre Antoine
Stringhini, Gianluca
Version
Accepted manuscript
OA Version
Citation
Yun Shen, Enrico Mariconti, Pierre Antoine Vervier, Gianluca Stringhini. 2018. "Tiresias: Predicting Security Events Through Deep Learning." Proceedings of the 2018 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security - CCS '18. the 2018 ACM SIGSAC Conference. 2018-10-15 - 2018-10-19. https://doi.org/10.1145/3243734.3243811
Abstract
With the increased complexity of modern computer attacks, there is a need for defenders not only to detect malicious activity as it happens, but also to predict the specific steps that will be taken by an adversary when performing an attack. However this is still an open research problem, and previous research in predicting malicious events only looked at binary outcomes (eg. whether an attack would happen or not), but not at the specific steps that an attacker would undertake. To fill this gap we present Tiresias xspace, a system that leverages Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) to predict future events on a machine, based on previous observations. We test Tiresias xspace on a dataset of 3.4 billion security events collected from a commercial intrusion prevention system, and show that our approach is effective in predicting the next event that will occur on a machine with a precision of up to 0.93. We also show that the models learned by Tiresias xspace are reasonably stable over time, and provide a mechanism that can identify sudden drops in precision and trigger a retraining of the system. Finally, we show that the long-term memory typical of RNNs is key in performing event prediction, rendering simpler methods not up to the task.