Cyber-Deception and Attribution in Capture-the-Flag Exercises
This addresses attribution challenges in cybersecurity, but is incremental as it applies existing methods to new data.
The study tackled the problem of attributing cyber-attack culprits by using DEFCON capture-the-flag exercise data with known ground truth, finding that deceptive activities cause most misclassifications and exploring heuristics to reduce this.
Attributing the culprit of a cyber-attack is widely considered one of the major technical and policy challenges of cyber-security. The lack of ground truth for an individual responsible for a given attack has limited previous studies. Here, we overcome this limitation by leveraging DEFCON capture-the-flag (CTF) exercise data where the actual ground-truth is known. In this work, we use various classification techniques to identify the culprit in a cyberattack and find that deceptive activities account for the majority of misclassified samples. We also explore several heuristics to alleviate some of the misclassification caused by deception.