A novel approach for detecting malicious hosts based on RE-GCN in intranet

Abstract Internal network attacks pose a serious security threat to enterprises and organizations, potentially leading to critical information leaks and network system damage. Hosts, as the core data and service bearers, are often primary targets of cyber attacks. Therefore, accurately identifying h...

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Main Authors: Haochen Xu, Xiaoyu Geng, Junrong Liu, Zhigang Lu, Bo Jiang, Yuling Liu
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: SpringerOpen 2024-12-01
Series:Cybersecurity
Subjects:
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1186/s42400-024-00242-8
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author Haochen Xu
Xiaoyu Geng
Junrong Liu
Zhigang Lu
Bo Jiang
Yuling Liu
author_facet Haochen Xu
Xiaoyu Geng
Junrong Liu
Zhigang Lu
Bo Jiang
Yuling Liu
author_sort Haochen Xu
collection DOAJ
description Abstract Internal network attacks pose a serious security threat to enterprises and organizations, potentially leading to critical information leaks and network system damage. Hosts, as the core data and service bearers, are often primary targets of cyber attacks. Therefore, accurately identifying hosts with malicious behavior in the network is crucial. However, detecting malicious hosts on this intranet presents several challenges. Firstly, the network state is unstructured data that dynamically changes in real-time. Secondly, the large amount of normal traffic in the network drowns out the traces generated by malicious behaviors, leading to the problem of category imbalance. Lastly, the traditional graph neural network model has limitations in processing edge information and is unable to directly learn the information in netflow. To overcome these challenges, this paper proposes a malicious host detection system. The system extracts the Host Communication Graph by time slicing and uses a random undersampling method to balance samples. For malicious host detection, this paper proposes the Relational-Edge Graph Convolutional Network (RE-GCN) model, which can directly aggregate and learn features on edges and use them to accurately classify nodes, compared to other GNN models. Comparative experiments were conducted on various netflow datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach. Our approach outperformed other common GNN models in detecting malicious hosts.
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institution Kabale University
issn 2523-3246
language English
publishDate 2024-12-01
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series Cybersecurity
spelling doaj-art-1fb88477a2a5480594ec8ada15e6ad392025-01-05T12:34:03ZengSpringerOpenCybersecurity2523-32462024-12-017111710.1186/s42400-024-00242-8A novel approach for detecting malicious hosts based on RE-GCN in intranetHaochen Xu0Xiaoyu Geng1Junrong Liu2Zhigang Lu3Bo Jiang4Yuling Liu5Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of SciencesInstitute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of SciencesInstitute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of SciencesInstitute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of SciencesInstitute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of SciencesInstitute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of SciencesAbstract Internal network attacks pose a serious security threat to enterprises and organizations, potentially leading to critical information leaks and network system damage. Hosts, as the core data and service bearers, are often primary targets of cyber attacks. Therefore, accurately identifying hosts with malicious behavior in the network is crucial. However, detecting malicious hosts on this intranet presents several challenges. Firstly, the network state is unstructured data that dynamically changes in real-time. Secondly, the large amount of normal traffic in the network drowns out the traces generated by malicious behaviors, leading to the problem of category imbalance. Lastly, the traditional graph neural network model has limitations in processing edge information and is unable to directly learn the information in netflow. To overcome these challenges, this paper proposes a malicious host detection system. The system extracts the Host Communication Graph by time slicing and uses a random undersampling method to balance samples. For malicious host detection, this paper proposes the Relational-Edge Graph Convolutional Network (RE-GCN) model, which can directly aggregate and learn features on edges and use them to accurately classify nodes, compared to other GNN models. Comparative experiments were conducted on various netflow datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach. Our approach outperformed other common GNN models in detecting malicious hosts.https://doi.org/10.1186/s42400-024-00242-8Malicious host detectionIntranetGraph neural network
spellingShingle Haochen Xu
Xiaoyu Geng
Junrong Liu
Zhigang Lu
Bo Jiang
Yuling Liu
A novel approach for detecting malicious hosts based on RE-GCN in intranet
Cybersecurity
Malicious host detection
Intranet
Graph neural network
title A novel approach for detecting malicious hosts based on RE-GCN in intranet
title_full A novel approach for detecting malicious hosts based on RE-GCN in intranet
title_fullStr A novel approach for detecting malicious hosts based on RE-GCN in intranet
title_full_unstemmed A novel approach for detecting malicious hosts based on RE-GCN in intranet
title_short A novel approach for detecting malicious hosts based on RE-GCN in intranet
title_sort novel approach for detecting malicious hosts based on re gcn in intranet
topic Malicious host detection
Intranet
Graph neural network
url https://doi.org/10.1186/s42400-024-00242-8
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