Towards Analyzing Traceability of Data Leakage by Malicious Insiders

Abstract

Data leakage committed by malicious insiders proposes a serious challenge for business secrets and intellectual property. Great efforts have been made to detect and mitigate insider threat. Due to the diversity in the motivations, previous work in this field mostly focuses on designing data holder’s data distribution and insider tracing algorithms, with little consideration of malicious insiders’ leakage strategies. In this paper, the traitors tracing problem is modeled as an incremental refining multi-step process. For each step, a metric is proposed to measure the efficiency of current tracing status. Theoretical and simulating analysis shows that malicious insiders can adopt sophisticated leakage strategies, which makes it difficult to distinguish them from others and leads to more innocent users involved as suspects. Thus it is important for the data holder to figure out the insiders’ leakage strategies and adopt proper tracing scheme to improve the refining process.

This work is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No.6100174), National Key Technology R&D Program (Grant No.2012BAH37B04) and Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant No. XDA06030200).