Proactive Defensive Techniques for Deception-Based Attacks
Abstract
The research team requests an award for cutting-edge, fundamental research on deception detection online and in emails/text messages to be performed by University of Houston (UH) faculty, postdocs and students. We observe that deception is key to misinformation on the web (e.g., fake news and fake reviews) and social engineering attacks (e.g., phishing, spear phishing and Business Email Compromise (BEC)). In both, the attacker(s) must design a plausible message or piece of text (e.g., fake news, phishing email) and use techniques (e.g., authority, inducement, deadline) to persuade the victim to take some kind of action (e.g., believe the news, spread the rumor via social media, click on phished email links). Therefore, in this proposal, we will develop proactive defensive techniques that combat these two very serious threats to the Internet economy and society. Specifically, we propose to design machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) techniques for these attacks that use theories of deception, trust, persuasion (e.g., psycholinguistic) and advances in NLP/machine learning to design better detectors for these two attacks. Another novel aspect of our work is that, in addition to designing detectors for these, we will also develop new attack generators, which are tools and techniques that can synthesize Òopen-ended,Ó new attacks. The goal is to close the loop by subjecting our detectors to these new attacks so that our detectors are continuously learning and improving themselves rather than passively waiting for attacks. We call these proactive defensive techniques as opposed to the current situation, where defenders deploy solutions that are then defeated by clever attackers, the Òarms raceÓ in cybersecurity. We will compare our techniques against state-of-the-art baselines on diverse datasets in realistic scenarios.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Jul 09, 2020
- Source ID
- W911NF2010254
Entities
People
- Arjun Mukherjee
Organizations
- Army Contracting Command
- Office of the Secretary of Defense
- University of Houston