Discovering Command and Control (C2) Channels on Tor and Public Networks Using Reinforcement Learning

Command and control (C2) channels are an essential component of many types of cyber attacks, as they enable attackers to remotely control their malware-infected machines and execute harmful actions, such as propagating malicious code across networks, exfiltrating confidential data, or initiating distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Identifying these C2 channels is therefore crucial in helping to mitigate and prevent cyber attacks. However, identifying C2 channels typically involves a manual process, requiring deep knowledge and expertise in cyber operations. In this paper, we propose a reinforcement learning (RL) based approach to automatically emulate C2 attack campaigns using both the normal (public) and the Tor networks. In addition, payload size and network firewalls are configured to simulate real-world attack scenarios. Results on a typical network configuration show that the RL agent can automatically discover resilient C2 attack paths utilizing both Tor-based and conventional communication channels, while also bypassing network firewalls.

Discovering Command and Control Channels Using Reinforcement Learning

Command and control (C2) paths for issuing commands to malware are sometimes the only indicators of its existence within networks. Identifying potential C2 channels is often a manually driven process that involves a deep understanding of cyber tradecraft. Efforts to improve discovery of these channels through using a reinforcement learning (RL) based approach that learns to automatically carry out C2 attack campaigns on large networks, where multiple defense layers are in place serves to drive efficiency for network operators. In this paper, we model C2 traffic flow as a three-stage process and formulate it as a Markov decision process (MDP) with the objective to maximize the number of valuable hosts whose data is exfiltrated. The approach also specifically models payload and defense mechanisms such as firewalls which is a novel contribution. The attack paths learned by the RL agent can in turn help the blue team identify high-priority vulnerabilities and develop improved defense strategies. The method is evaluated on a large network with more than a thousand hosts and the results demonstrate that the agent can effectively learn attack paths while avoiding firewalls.

FedBayes: A Zero-Trust Federated Learning Aggregation to Defend Against Adversarial Attacks

Federated learning has created a decentralized method to train a machine learning model without needing direct access to client data. The main goal of a federated learning architecture is to protect the privacy of each client while still contributing to the training of the global model. However, the main advantage of privacy in federated learning is also the easiest aspect to exploit. Without being able to see the clients' data, it is difficult to determine the quality of the data. By utilizing data poisoning methods, such as backdoor or label-flipping attacks, or by sending manipulated information about their data back to the server, malicious clients are able to corrupt the global model and degrade performance across all clients within a federation. Our novel aggregation method, FedBayes, mitigates the effect of a malicious client by calculating the probabilities of a client's model weights given to the prior model's weights using Bayesian statistics. Our results show that this approach negates the effects of malicious clients and protects the overall federation.

MIA-BAD: An Approach for Enhancing Membership Inference Attack and its Mitigation with Federated Learning

The membership inference attack (MIA) is a popular paradigm for compromising the privacy of a machine learning (ML) model. MIA exploits the natural inclination of ML models to overfit upon the training data. MIAs are trained to distinguish between training and testing prediction confidence to infer membership information. Federated Learning (FL) is a privacy-preserving ML paradigm that enables multiple clients to train a unified model without disclosing their private data. In this paper, we propose an enhanced Membership Inference Attack with the Batch-wise generated Attack Dataset (MIA-BAD), a modification to the MIA approach. We investigate that the MIA is more accurate when the attack dataset is generated batch-wise. This quantitatively decreases the attack dataset while qualitatively improving it. We show how training an ML model through FL, has some distinct advantages and investigate how the threat introduced with the proposed MIA-BAD approach can be mitigated with FL approaches. Finally, we demonstrate the qualitative effects of the proposed MIA-BAD methodology by conducting extensive experiments with various target datasets, variable numbers of federated clients, and training batch sizes.

A Simple yet Efficient Ensemble Approach for AI-generated Text Detection

Recent Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in generating text that closely resembles human writing across wide range of styles and genres. However, such capabilities are prone to potential abuse, such as fake news generation, spam email creation, and misuse in academic assignments. Hence, it is essential to build automated approaches capable of distinguishing between artificially generated text and human-authored text. In this paper, we propose a simple yet efficient solution to this problem by ensembling predictions from multiple constituent LLMs. Compared to previous state-of-the-art approaches, which are perplexity-based or uses ensembles with a number of LLMs, our condensed ensembling approach uses only two constituent LLMs to achieve comparable performance. Experiments conducted on four benchmark datasets for generative text classification show performance improvements in the range of 0.5 to 100\% compared to previous state-of-the-art approaches. We also study the influence that the training data from individual LLMs have on model performance. We found that substituting commercially-restrictive Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) data with data generated from other open language models such as Falcon, Large Language Model Meta AI (LLaMA2), and Mosaic Pretrained Transformers (MPT) is a feasible alternative when developing generative text detectors. Furthermore, to demonstrate zero-shot generalization, we experimented with an English essays dataset, and results suggest that our ensembling approach can handle new data effectively.

A Closer Look at Bearing Fault Classification Approaches

Rolling bearing fault diagnosis has garnered increased attention in recent years owing to its presence in rotating machinery across various industries, and an ever increasing demand for efficient operations. Prompt detection and accurate prediction of bearing failures can help reduce the likelihood of unexpected machine downtime and enhance maintenance schedules, averting lost productivity. Recent technological advances have enabled monitoring the health of these assets at scale using a variety of sensors, and predicting the failures using modern Machine Learning (ML) approaches including deep learning architectures. Vibration data has been collected using accelerated run-to-failure of overloaded bearings, or by introducing known failure in bearings, under a variety of operating conditions such as rotating speed, load on the bearing, type of bearing fault, and data acquisition frequency. However, in the development of bearing failure classification models using vibration data there is a lack of consensus in the metrics used to evaluate the models, data partitions used to evaluate models, and methods used to generate failure labels in run-to-failure experiments. An understanding of the impact of these choices is important to reliably develop models, and deploy them in practical settings. In this work, we demonstrate the significance of these choices on the performance of the models using publicly-available vibration datasets, and suggest model development considerations for real world scenarios. Our experimental findings demonstrate that assigning vibration data from a given bearing across training and evaluation splits leads to over-optimistic performance estimates, PCA-based approach is able to robustly generate labels for failure classification in run-to-failure experiments, and $F$ scores are more insightful to evaluate the models with unbalanced real-world failure data.

Generative AI Text Classification using Ensemble LLM Approaches

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance across a variety of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and natural language processing tasks, such as content creation, report generation, etc. However, unregulated malign application of these models can create undesirable consequences such as generation of fake news, plagiarism, etc. As a result, accurate detection of AI-generated language can be crucial in responsible usage of LLMs. In this work, we explore 1) whether a certain body of text is AI generated or written by human, and 2) attribution of a specific language model in generating a body of text. Texts in both English and Spanish are considered. The datasets used in this study are provided as part of the Automated Text Identification (AuTexTification) shared task. For each of the research objectives stated above, we propose an ensemble neural model that generates probabilities from different pre-trained LLMs which are used as features to a Traditional Machine Learning (TML) classifier following it. For the first task of distinguishing between AI and human generated text, our model ranked in fifth and thirteenth place (with macro $F1$ scores of 0.733 and 0.649) for English and Spanish texts, respectively. For the second task on model attribution, our model ranked in first place with macro $F1$ scores of 0.625 and 0.653 for English and Spanish texts, respectively.

A Novel Approach To User Agent String Parsing For Vulnerability Analysis Using Mutli-Headed Attention

The increasing reliance on the internet has led to the proliferation of a diverse set of web-browsers and operating systems (OSs) capable of browsing the web. User agent strings (UASs) are a component of web browsing that are transmitted with every Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) request. They contain information about the client device and software, which is used by web servers for various purposes such as content negotiation and security. However, due to the proliferation of various browsers and devices, parsing UASs is a non-trivial task due to a lack of standardization of UAS formats. Current rules-based approaches are often brittle and can fail when encountering such non-standard formats. In this work, a novel methodology for parsing UASs using Multi-Headed Attention Based transformers is proposed. The proposed methodology exhibits strong performance in parsing a variety of UASs with differing formats. Furthermore, a framework to utilize parsed UASs to estimate the vulnerability scores for large sections of publicly visible IT networks or regions is also discussed. The methodology present here can also be easily extended or deployed for real-time parsing of logs in enterprise settings.

Exposing Surveillance Detection Routes via Reinforcement Learning, Attack Graphs, and Cyber Terrain

Reinforcement learning (RL) operating on attack graphs leveraging cyber terrain principles are used to develop reward and state associated with determination of surveillance detection routes (SDR). This work extends previous efforts on developing RL methods for path analysis within enterprise networks. This work focuses on building SDR where the routes focus on exploring the network services while trying to evade risk. RL is utilized to support the development of these routes by building a reward mechanism that would help in realization of these paths. The RL algorithm is modified to have a novel warm-up phase which decides in the initial exploration which areas of the network are safe to explore based on the rewards and penalty scale factor.

Zero Day Threat Detection Using Metric Learning Autoencoders

The proliferation of zero-day threats (ZDTs) to companies' networks has been immensely costly and requires novel methods to scan traffic for malicious behavior at massive scale. The diverse nature of normal behavior along with the huge landscape of attack types makes deep learning methods an attractive option for their ability to capture highly-nonlinear behavior patterns. In this paper, the authors demonstrate an improvement upon a previously introduced methodology, which used a dual-autoencoder approach to identify ZDTs in network flow telemetry. In addition to the previously-introduced asset-level graph features, which help abstractly represent the role of a host in its network, this new model uses metric learning to train the second autoencoder on labeled attack data. This not only produces stronger performance, but it has the added advantage of improving the interpretability of the model by allowing for multiclass classification in the latent space. This can potentially save human threat hunters time when they investigate predicted ZDTs by showing them which known attack classes were nearby in the latent space. The models presented here are also trained and evaluated with two more datasets, and continue to show promising results even when generalizing to new network topologies.