Cyber Profiles Based Risk Prediction of Application Systems for Effective Access Control
Degang Sun, Zhengrong Wu, Yan Wang, Qiujian Lv, Bo Hu · 2019
Application systems maintain critical sensitive information of an enterprise and especially huge number of data with specific ownership. Unauthorized modification or deletion of data caused by cyber attacks may bring tremendous loses for enterprises. To reduce the damage of cyber attacks, existing techniques have been proposed to predict the potential risk of external attacks at the level of an enterprise, a user, or a machine. However, risk prediction has not been conducted at the level of application systems, which may suffer from external attacks or insider threats. This paper proposes a model based on machine learning to predict whether the application systems of an enterprise have the risk of unauthorized access by using a cyber profile. In particular, the cyber profile is composed of features extracted from the information of the three domains in cyberspace: Information Infrastructure domain, Data domain, and Application domain. The core idea of the model selects the most significant features that have a large impact on the occurrence of unauthorized access to application systems. At last, by using a limited number of selected features, high forecast accuracy is achieved. These results verify the effectiveness of the prediction model, which can potentially be exploited to guide the adjustment of access control policies for effective access control.