Toward Collaborative Defense Across Organizations

Abstract

New attack methods, such as new malware and exploits are released every day. Attack information is essential to improve defense mechanisms. However, we can identify barriers against attack information sharing. One barrier is that most targeted organizations do not want to disclose the attack and incident information because they fear negative public relations caused by disclosing incident information. Another barrier is that attack and incident information include confidential information. To address this problem, we propose a confidentiality-preserving collaborative defense architecture that analyzes incident information without disclosing confidential information of the attacked organizations. To avoid disclosure of confidential information, the key features of the proposed architecture are (1) exchange of trained classifiers, e.g., neural networks, that represent abstract information rather than raw attack/incident information and (2) classifier aggregation via ensemble learning to build an accurate classifier using the information of the collaborative organizations. We implement and evaluate an initial prototype of the proposed architecture. The results indicate that the malware classification accuracy improved from 90.4% to 92.2% by aggregating five organization classifiers. We conclude that the proposed architecture is feasible and demonstrates practical performance. We expect that the proposed architecture will facilitate an effective and collaborative response to current attack-defense situations.