CyberRank- Knowledge Elicitation for Risk Assessment of Database Security

Security systems for databases produce numerous alerts about anomalous activities and policy rule violations. Prioritizing these alerts will help security personnel focus their efforts on the most urgent alerts. Currently, this is done manually by security experts that rank the alerts or define static risk scoring rules. Existing solutions are expensive, consume valuable expert time, and do not dynamically adapt to changes in policy. Adopting a learning approach for ranking alerts is complex due to the efforts required by security experts to initially train such a model. The more features used, the more accurate the model is likely to be, but this will require the collection of a greater amount of user feedback and prolong the calibration process. In this paper, we propose CyberRank, a novel algorithm for automatic preference elicitation that is effective for situations with limited experts’ time and outperforms other algorithms for initial training of the system. We generate synthetic examples and annotate them using a model produced by Analytic Hierarchical Processing (AHP) to bootstrap a preference learning algorithm. We evaluate different approaches with a new dataset of expert ranked pairs of database transactions, in terms of their risk to the organization. We evaluated using manual risk assessments of transaction pairs, CyberRank outperforms all other methods for cold start scenario with error reduction of 20%.