APIRO: A Framework for Automated Security Tools API Recommendation

TL;DR

APIRO is a learning-based framework that automates the recommendation of security tool APIs for SOAR platforms, improving efficiency by addressing data heterogeneity and semantic variation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel data augmentation and deep learning approach for automatic security API recommendation, enhancing SOC automation capabilities.

Findings

Achieves 91.9% Top-1 accuracy in API recommendation

Effectively handles data heterogeneity and semantic variation

Demonstrates success with 3 security tools and 36 augmentation techniques

Abstract

Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) platforms integrate and orchestrate a wide variety of security tools to accelerate the operational activities of Security Operation Center (SOC). Integration of security tools in a SOAR platform is mostly done manually using APIs, plugins, and scripts. SOC teams need to navigate through API calls of different security tools to find a suitable API to define or update an incident response action. Analyzing various types of API documentation with diverse API format and presentation structure involves significant challenges such as data availability, data heterogeneity, and semantic variation for automatic identification of security tool APIs specific to a particular task. Given these challenges can have negative impact on SOC team's ability to handle security incident effectively and efficiently, we consider it important to devise suitable automated support solutions to address these challenges. We propose a novel learning-based framework for automated security tool API Recommendation for security Orchestration, automation, and response, APIRO. To mitigate data availability constraint, APIRO enriches security tool API description by applying a wide variety of data augmentation techniques. To learn data heterogeneity of the security tools and semantic variation in API descriptions, APIRO consists of an API-specific word embedding model and a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model that are used for prediction of top 3 relevant APIs for a task. We experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of APIRO in recommending APIs for different tasks using 3 security tools and 36 augmentation techniques. Our experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of APIRO for achieving 91.9% Top-1 Accuracy.