Graph Mining for Cybersecurity: A Survey

The explosive growth of cyber attacks nowadays, such as malware, spam, and intrusions, caused severe consequences on society. Securing cyberspace has become an utmost concern for organizations and governments. Traditional Machine Learning (ML) based methods are extensively used in detecting cyber threats, but they hardly model the correlations between real-world cyber entities. In recent years, with the proliferation of graph mining techniques, many researchers investigated these techniques for capturing correlations between cyber entities and achieving high performance. It is imperative to summarize existing graph-based cybersecurity solutions to provide a guide for future studies. Therefore, as a key contribution of this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of graph mining for cybersecurity, including an overview of cybersecurity tasks, the typical graph mining techniques, and the general process of applying them to cybersecurity, as well as various solutions for different cybersecurity tasks. For each task, we probe into relevant methods and highlight the graph types, graph approaches, and task levels in their modeling. Furthermore, we collect open datasets and toolkits for graph-based cybersecurity. Finally, we outlook the potential directions of this field for future research

xFraud: Explainable Fraud Transaction Detection

At online retail platforms, it is crucial to actively detect the risks of transactions to improve customer experience and minimize financial loss. In this work, we propose xFraud, an explainable fraud transaction prediction framework which is mainly composed of a detector and an explainer. The xFraud detector can effectively and efficiently predict the legitimacy of incoming transactions. Specifically, it utilizes a heterogeneous graph neural network to learn expressive representations from the informative heterogeneously typed entities in the transaction logs. The explainer in xFraud can generate meaningful and human-understandable explanations from graphs to facilitate further processes in the business unit. In our experiments with xFraud on real transaction networks with up to 1.1 billion nodes and 3.7 billion edges, xFraud is able to outperform various baseline models in many evaluation metrics while remaining scalable in distributed settings. In addition, we show that xFraud explainer can generate reasonable explanations to significantly assist the business analysis via both quantitative and qualitative evaluations.Comment: This is the extended version of a full paper to appear in PVLDB 15 (3) (VLDB 2022

Enhancing Graph Neural Network-based Fraud Detectors against Camouflaged Fraudsters

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been widely applied to fraud detection problems in recent years, revealing the suspiciousness of nodes by aggregating their neighborhood information via different relations. However, few prior works have noticed the camouflage behavior of fraudsters, which could hamper the performance of GNN-based fraud detectors during the aggregation process. In this paper, we introduce two types of camouflages based on recent empirical studies, i.e., the feature camouflage and the relation camouflage. Existing GNNs have not addressed these two camouflages, which results in their poor performance in fraud detection problems. Alternatively, we propose a new model named CAmouflage-REsistant GNN (CARE-GNN), to enhance the GNN aggregation process with three unique modules against camouflages. Concretely, we first devise a label-aware similarity measure to find informative neighboring nodes. Then, we leverage reinforcement learning (RL) to find the optimal amounts of neighbors to be selected. Finally, the selected neighbors across different relations are aggregated together. Comprehensive experiments on two real-world fraud datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the RL algorithm. The proposed CARE-GNN also outperforms state-of-the-art GNNs and GNN-based fraud detectors. We integrate all GNN-based fraud detectors as an opensource toolbox: https://github.com/safe-graph/DGFraud. The CARE-GNN code and datasets are available at https://github.com/YingtongDou/CARE-GNN.Comment: Accepted by CIKM 202

Movement: Journey of the Beat

Movement: Journey of the Beat addresses the trajectory and transition of popular culture through the modality of rhythm. It configures fresh narratives and new histories necessary to understand why auditory cultures have become increasingly significant in the digital age. Atomised and mobile technologies, which utilise sonic media through streaming, on-line radio and podcasts, have become ubiquitous in a post-work environment. These sonic media provide not merely the mechanisms of connection but also the contexts for understanding changing formations of both identity and community. This research addresses, through rhythm, how popular music culture, central to changing perceptions of ‘self’ and ‘others’ through patterns of production and consumption, must also be viewed as instrumental in shaping new platforms of communication that have resonance not only through the emergence of new social networks and cultural economies but also in the development of media literacies and pedagogic strategies. The shift to online technologies for cultural production and global consumption, although immersed in leisure practices, more significantly alludes to changing dynamics of power and knowledge. An online ecology represents a significant shift in the role of place and time in creative production and its subsequent access. Popular music invariably provides an entry point and subsequent platform for such shifts and this thesis looks to the rhythms within this popular culture in as much as they encode these transformations. This doctoral research builds on the candidate’s established career as music producer, broadcaster, journalist and teacher to construct an appropriate theoretical framework to indicate how the construction, transmission and consumption of popular music rhythms give an understanding of changing social contexts. The thesis maps the movement of commonly recognised popular rhythms from their places of construction to the spaces of reception within broader political, socio-economic and cultural frameworks. The thesis probes the contribution of place and time in transforming global cultures, via social geography and memory, positioning such changes within readings of mobility, stasis, modernity and technology. By consciously addressing multiple disciplines, from populist to academic, Movement provides evidence of how wider structural changes have become reified within the beat and how in turn rhythm provides an appropriate modality through which change can be negotiated and understood

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

The Production of Art Cinema Culture in China: An Exploration of the Role of Cultural Intermediaries

This thesis offers an ethnographic account of how art cinema culture is produced in China since the turn of twenty-first century. With an underdeveloped art cinema infrastructure and the endurance of forceful Party-state control over public cinematic spaces, there have emerged numerous individuals and organisations taking part in circulating the information and appreciation of the art of film through a number of different alternative paths and networks. This thesis scrutinises the role of the intermediary practitioners – particularly those involved in independent exhibition, internet criticism and underground distribution – and how they think about cinema, negotiate judgement and appreciation, and construct a discourse of value and taste. It is argued that, although their motivation was derived from a cinephilia seeking to forge an alternative mode of distribution and reception, the ‘new’ cinema culture they have produced simultaneously negotiates a subtly complicit relationship with authoritative and market forces. Their cultural practices and engagement oscillates between the status of independence and autonomy, a rejection of cultural homogeneity and monopolisation, and culture as promotion that accrues a public image and recognition. Moreover, involved in diversified practices and taste formation, the intermediary practitioners have also sought to produce a new form of legitimacy in reference to cultural value and judgement. To attain their legitimacy, they have sought to constitute a coordinated and interrelated network in the site of art cinema. The network is manifested – its mode of operation explicitly – as part of the art film culture in a way that represents the larger spectrum of socio-cultural hierarchy in contemporary Chinese culture and society

An Approach to Guide Users Towards Less Revealing Internet Browsers

When browsing the Internet, HTTP headers enable both clients and servers send extra data in their requests or responses such as the User-Agent string. This string contains information related to the sender’s device, browser, and operating system. Previous research has shown that there are numerous privacy and security risks result from exposing sensitive information in the User-Agent string. For example, it enables device and browser fingerprinting and user tracking and identification. Our large analysis of thousands of User-Agent strings shows that browsers differ tremendously in the amount of information they include in their User-Agent strings. As such, our work aims at guiding users towards using less exposing browsers. In doing so, we propose to assign an exposure score to browsers based on the information they expose and vulnerability records. Thus, our contribution in this work is as follows: first, provide a full implementation that is ready to be deployed and used by users. Second, conduct a user study to identify the effectiveness and limitations of our proposed approach. Our implementation is based on using more than 52 thousand unique browsers. Our performance and validation analysis show that our solution is accurate and efficient. The source code and data set are publicly available and the solution has been deployed

Exhibiting Climate Change: An Examination of the Thresholds of Arts-Sciences Collaborations in the Context of Learning for a Sustainable Future

This dissertation probes the cultural and political thresholds of arts–sciences collaborations in the context of the development of public pedagogy about a sustainable response to climate change. The dissertation is an in-depth case study of a civil society group called Cape Farewell that is organizing collaborations between contemporary artists and climate scientists. Since 2003, Cape Farewell has been leading expeditions to the Arctic, the Andes, and the Scottish Islands and Faroes that bring artists, scientists, educators, and other creative communicators together to innovate public pedagogy about a sustainable response to climate change. Drawing on sustainability theory, Jacques Rancière’s theory of political aesthetics, Grant Kester’s theory of artistic collaboration, phenomenological curriculum theory, and Tim Ingold’s notion of wayfinding, the dissertation describes these expeditionary field studies as forms of ecological wayfinding. By following the wayfaring path of learners alongside materials and shared metaphors from field studies to cultural productions, I describe the multifaceted dimensions of ecological wayfinding in relation to arts-based research, curriculum, and pedagogy. Building on Elizabeth Ellsworth’s theory of pedagogical pivot points, I describe the potential of the climate exhibitions, art works, films, websites, and concerts to produce visionary possibilities for a sustainable future on the planet. These public pedagogies variously negotiate the political thresholds of neoliberalism, the cultural thresholds of Romanticism, and disciplinary thresholds in higher education. Central to my argument is that we need to develop place-based and interdisciplinary sustainability curricula and pedagogy in postsecondary art education in order to foster more meaningful forms of collaboration across the arts and the sciences and alongside socioecological places. Finally, we need to envision an ethics of sustainability on the scale of the cosmos rather than the market via the intimate expenditure of bodies-in-motion and the generosity, empathy, and hospitality that can be inspired by emergent forms of relational and site-specific art practice