TWC: Medium: Collaborative: Data is Social: Exploiting Data Relationships to Detect Insider Attacks

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Insider attacks present an extremely serious, pervasive and costly security problem under critical domains such as national defense and financial and banking sector. Accurate insider threat detection has proved to be a very challenging problem. This project explores detecting insider threats in a banking environment by analyzing database searches. This research addresses the challenge by formulating and devising machine learning-based solutions to the insider attack problem on relational database management systems (RDBMS), which are ubiquitous and are highly susceptible to insider attacks. In particular, the research uses a new general model for database provenance, which captures both the data values accessed or modified by a user's activity and summarizes the computational path and the underlying relationship between those data values. The provenance model leads naturally to a way to model user activities by labeled hypergraph distributions and by a Markov network whose factors represent the data relationships. The key tradeoff being studied theoretically is between the expressivity and the complexity of the provenance model. The research results are validated and evaluated by intimately collaborating with a large financial institution to build a prototype insider threat detection engine operating on its existing operational RDBMS. In particular, with the help of the security team from the financial institution, the research team addresses database performance, learning scalability, and software tool development issues arising during the evaluation and deployment of the system. Research results are reported via technical papers and disseminated through conferences and journals, through a new research webpage at the UB's NSA- and DHS-certified center of excellence (CAE) in Information Assurance, and at the center's future workshops.