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Detecting Advanced Persistent Threat in Edge Computing via Federated Learning

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Security and Privacy in Digital Economy (SPDE 2020)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 1268))

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Abstract

Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) is one of the most menacing and stealthy multiple-steps attacks in the context of information systems and IoT-related applications. Recently, with increasing losses to organizations caused by APT, its detection has attracted more attention in both academia and industry. However, conventional attack detection methods cannot be used to defense APT ideally for the following reasons: 1) misuse-based mechanisms require too much expert knowledge of APT attacks; 2) anomaly-based strategies lead to many false positives; 3) machine learning-based solutions lack training dataset that describes APT patterns. Thus, we propose a novel detection system in edge computing systems based on federated learning, named FLAPT, to detect APT attacks. The federated model can learn various APT attack patterns by maintaining a global model across multiple clients. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed system can detect various attacks including real-life APT campaigns with high detection accuracy and low false alarm rate.

Supported in part by the National Key R&D Program of China, under Grant 2019YFB2102000, in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, under Grant 61672283, and in part by the Postgraduate Research & Practice Innovation Program of Jiangsu Province under Grant KYCX18_0308.

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Acknowledgment

This work was supported in part by the National Key Research and Development Program of China under Grant 2017YFB0802303, in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 61672283 and Grant 61602238, in part by the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province under Grant BK20160805, and in part by the Postgraduate Research & Practice Innovation Program of Jiangsu Province under Grant KYCX18_0308.

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Correspondence to Bing Chen .

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Li, Z., Chen, J., Zhang, J., Cheng, X., Chen, B. (2020). Detecting Advanced Persistent Threat in Edge Computing via Federated Learning. In: Yu, S., Mueller, P., Qian, J. (eds) Security and Privacy in Digital Economy. SPDE 2020. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1268. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9129-7_36

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9129-7_36

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore

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  • Online ISBN: 978-981-15-9129-7

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