학술논문

A Statistical Relational Learning Approach Towards Products, Software Vulnerabilities and Exploits
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management IEEE Trans. Netw. Serv. Manage. Network and Service Management, IEEE Transactions on. 20(3):3782-3802 Sep, 2023
Subject
Communication, Networking and Broadcast Technologies
Computing and Processing
Weapons
Integrated circuits
Regression tree analysis
Probabilistic logic
Grounding
Internet
Instruments
Statistical relational learning
security
exploits
Language
ISSN
1932-4537
2373-7379
Abstract
Data on software vulnerabilities, products, and exploits are typically collected from multiple non-structured sources. Valuable information, e.g., on which products are affected by which exploits, is conveyed by matching data from those sources, i.e., through their relations. In this paper, we leverage this simple albeit unexplored observation to introduce a statistical relational learning (SRL) approach for the analysis of vulnerabilities, products, and exploits. In particular, we focus on the problem of determining the existence of an exploit for a given product, given information about the relations between products and vulnerabilities, and vulnerabilities and exploits, focusing on Industrial Control Systems (ICS), the National Vulnerability Database, and ExploitDB. Using RDN-Boost, we were able to reach an AUC ROC of 0.80 and an AUC PR of 0.65 for the problem at hand. To reach that performance, we indicate that it is instrumental to include textual features, e.g., extracted from the description of vulnerabilities, as well as structured information, e.g., about product categories. In addition, using interpretable relational regression trees, we report simple rules that shed insight on factors impacting the weaponization of ICS products.