Mapping the Internet: Modelling Entity Interactions in Complex Heterogeneous Networks

TL;DR

The paper introduces HMill, a versatile framework for modeling complex heterogeneous networks, enabling flexible machine learning on diverse data types, with theoretical justification and successful cybersecurity applications.

Contribution

HMill is a unified, flexible framework that extends multi-instance learning and includes a universal approximation theorem, facilitating modeling of heterogeneous, hierarchical, and missing data.

Findings

Achieved comparable performance to specialized methods in cybersecurity tasks

Extended universal approximation theorem for models in the framework

Demonstrated versatility across three diverse cybersecurity applications

Abstract

Even though machine learning algorithms already play a significant role in data science, many current methods pose unrealistic assumptions on input data. The application of such methods is difficult due to incompatible data formats, or heterogeneous, hierarchical or entirely missing data fragments in the dataset. As a solution, we propose a versatile, unified framework called `HMill' for sample representation, model definition and training. We review in depth a multi-instance paradigm for machine learning that the framework builds on and extends. To theoretically justify the design of key components of HMill, we show an extension of the universal approximation theorem to the set of all functions realized by models implemented in the framework. The text also contains a detailed discussion on technicalities and performance improvements in our implementation, which is published for download under the MIT License. The main asset of the framework is its flexibility, which makes modelling of diverse real-world data sources with the same tool possible. Additionally to the standard setting in which a set of attributes is observed for each object individually, we explain how message-passing inference in graphs that represent whole systems of objects can be implemented in the framework. To support our claims, we solve three different problems from the cybersecurity domain using the framework. The first use case concerns IoT device identification from raw network observations. In the second problem, we study how malicious binary files can be classified using a snapshot of the operating system represented as a directed graph. The last provided example is a task of domain blacklist extension through modelling interactions between entities in the network. In all three problems, the solution based on the proposed framework achieves performance comparable to specialized approaches.