Yingze Liu

Cyber security systems generally have the phenomena of passive defense and low-efficiency early warnings. Aiming at the above problems, this study proposes a real-time warning and plans an AI defense strategy for a cyber security system aided by a security ontology. First, we design a security defense ontology that integrates attack graphs, general purpose and domain-specific knowledge bases, and on this basis, we (1) develop an ontology-driven method of early warnings of real-time attacks, which supports non-intrusive scanning attack detection and (2) combine artificial intelligence planning and bounded rationality to recommend and automatically execute defense strategies in conventional defense scenarios. A case study has been performed, and the results indicate that: (1) the proposed method can quickly analyze network traffic data for real-time warnings, (2) the proposed method is highly feasible and has the ability to implement defense strategies autonomously, and (3) the proposed method performs the best, with a 5.4–11.4% increase in defense effectiveness against the state-of-the-art counterparts considering the APT29 attack. Overall, the proposed method holds the potential to increase the defense effectiveness against cyberattacks under high computing resource constraints.

The increasing number of cyberattacks has made the cybersecurity situation more serious. Thus, it is urgent to use cyber threat intelligence to deal with the complex and changing cyber environment. However, cyber threat intelligence usually exists in an unstructured form, and a huge amount of data poses a great challenge to security analysts. To this end, this paper proposes a novel threat intelligence information extraction system combining multiple models, which contains four key steps: entity extraction, coreference resolution, relation extraction, and knowledge graph construction. In the entity extraction task, a multihead self-attention mechanism is adopted to extract the dependency relationships between words. In the coreference resolution task, contextual information and mention embedding are fused to improve the mention representation. Meanwhile, features of different dimensions are extracted using a convolutional neural network. In the relation extraction task, additional features such as part of speech, mention width, entity type, and distance of entity pairs are incorporated to improve the embedding representation. Finally, a knowledge graph is constructed to explicitly present entities and their relationships. Experimental results indicate that compared with the baseline model, the F1 score of our model is improved by at least 8.87, 9.82, and 10.56 on entity extraction, coreference resolution, and relation extraction, respectively. The knowledge graph in Neo4j demonstrates the effectiveness of our system.

Relation extraction in the threat intelligence domain plays an important role in mining the internal association between crucial threat elements and constructing a knowledge graph (KG). This study designed a novel document-level relation extraction model, FEDRE-KD, integrating additional features to take full advantage of the information in documents. The study also introduced a teacher–student model, realizing knowledge distillation, to further improve performance. Additionally, a threat intelligence ontology was constructed to standardize the entities and their relationships. To solve the problem of lack of publicly available datasets for threat intelligence, manual annotation was carried out on the documents collected from social blogs, vendor bulletins, and hacking forums. After training the model, we constructed a threat intelligence knowledge graph in Neo4j. Experimental results indicate the effectiveness of additional features and knowledge distillation. Compared to mainstream models SSAN, GAIN, and ATLOP, FEDRE-KD improved the F1score by 22.07, 20.06, and 22.38, respectively.