Machine Learning and Security

Preface

Machine learning is eating the world. From communication and finance to transportation, manufacturing, and even agriculture,¹ nearly every technology field has been transformed by machine learning and artificial intelligence, or will soon be.

Computer security is also eating the world. As we become dependent on computers for an ever-greater proportion of our work, entertainment, and social lives, the value of breaching these systems increases proportionally, drawing in an increasing pool of attackers hoping to make money or simply wreak mischief. Furthermore, as systems become increasingly complex and interconnected, it becomes harder and harder to ensure that there are no bugs or backdoors that will give attackers a way in. Indeed, as this book went to press we learned that pretty much every microprocessor currently in use is insecure.²

With machine learning offering (potential) solutions to everything under the sun, it is only natural that it be applied to computer security, a field which intrinsically provides the robust data sets on which machine learning thrives. Indeed, for all the security threats that appear in the news, we hear just as many claims about how A.I. can “revolutionize” the way we deal with security. Because of the promise that it holds for nullifying some of the most complex advances in attacker competency, machine learning has been touted as the technique that will finally put an end to the cat-and-mouse game between attackers and defenders. Walking the expo floors of major security conferences, the trend is apparent: more and more companies are embracing the use of machine learning to solve security problems.

Mirroring the growing interest in the marriage of these two fields, there is a corresponding air of cynicism that dismisses it as hype. So how do we strike a balance? What is the true potential of A.I. applied to security? How can you distinguish the marketing fluff from promising technologies? What should I actually use to solve my security problems? The best way we can think of to answer these questions is to dive deep into the science, understand the core concepts, do lots of testing and experimentation, and let the results speak for themselves. However, doing this requires a working knowledge of both data science and computer security. In the course of our work building security systems, leading anti-abuse teams, and speaking at conferences, we have met a few people who have this knowledge, and many more who understand one side and want to learn about the other.

This book is the result.

What’s In This Book?

We wrote this book to provide a framework for discussing the inevitable marriage of two ubiquitous concepts: machine learning and security. While there is some literature on the intersection of these subjects (and multiple conference workshops: CCS’s AISec, AAAI’s AICS, and NIPS’s Machine Deception), most of the existing work is academic or theoretical. In particular, we did not find a guide that provides concrete, worked examples with code that can educate security practitioners about data science and help machine learning practitioners think about modern security problems effectively.

In examining a broad range of topics in the security space, we provide examples of how machine learning can be applied to augment or replace rule-based or heuristic solutions to problems like intrusion detection, malware classification, or network analysis. In addition to exploring the core machine learning algorithms and techniques, we focus on the challenges of building maintainable, reliable, and scalable data mining systems in the security space. Through worked examples and guided discussions, we show you how to think about data in an adversarial environment and how to identify the important signals that can get drowned out by noise.

Who Is This Book For?

If you are working in the security field and want to use machine learning to improve your systems, this book is for you. If you have worked with machine learning and now want to use it to solve security problems, this book is also for you.

We assume you have some basic knowledge of statistics; most of the more complex math can be skipped upon your first reading without losing the concepts. We also assume familiarity with a programming language. Our examples are in Python and we provide references to the Python packages required to implement the concepts we discuss, but you can implement the same concepts using open source libraries in Java, Scala, C++, Ruby, and many other languages.

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank Hyrum Anderson, Jason Craig, Nwokedi Idika, Jess Males, Andy Oram, Alex Pinto, and Joshua Saxe for thorough technical reviews and feedback on early drafts of this work. We also thank Virginia Wilson, Kristen Brown, and all the staff at O’Reilly who helped us take this project from concept to reality.

Clarence thanks Christina Zhou for tolerating the countless all-nighters and weekends spent on this book, Yik Lun Lee for proofreading drafts and finding mistakes in my code, Jarrod Overson for making me believe I could do this, and Daisy the Chihuahua for being at my side through the toughest of times. Thanks to Anto Joseph for teaching me security, to all the other hackers, researchers, and training attendees who have influenced this book in one way or another, to my colleagues at Shape Security for making me a better engineer, and to Data Mining for Cyber Security speakers and attendees for being part of the community that drives this research. Most of all, thanks to my family in Singapore for supporting me from across the globe and enabling me to chase my dreams and pursue my passion.

David thanks Deepak Agarwal for convincing me to undertake this effort, Dan Boneh for teaching me how to think about security, and Vicente Silveira and my colleagues at LinkedIn and Facebook for showing me what security is like in the real world. Thanks also to Grace Tang for feedback on the machine learning sections as well as the occasional penguin. And the biggest thanks go to Torrey, Elodie, and Phoebe, who put up with me taking many very late nights and a few odd excursions in order to complete this book, and never wavered in their support.

¹ Monsanto, “How Machine Learning is Changing Modern Agriculture,” Modern Agriculture, September 13, 2017, https://modernag.org/innovation/machine-learning-changing-modern-agriculture/.

² “Meltdown and Spectre,” Graz University of Technology, accessed January 23, 2018, https://spectreattack.com/.