Although sharing data across organizations is often advocated as a promising
way to enhance cybersecurity, collaborative initiatives are rarely put into
practice owing to confidentiality, trust, and liability challenges. In this
paper, we investigate whether collaborative threat mitigation can be realized
via a controlled data sharing approach, whereby organizations make informed
decisions as to whether or not, and how much, to share. Using appropriate
cryptographic tools, entities can estimate the benefits of collaboration and
agree on what to share in a privacy-preserving way, without having to disclose
their datasets. We focus on collaborative predictive blacklisting, i.e.,
forecasting attack sources based on one's logs and those contributed by other
organizations. We study the impact of different sharing strategies by
experimenting on a real-world dataset of two billion suspicious IP addresses
collected from Dshield over two months. We find that controlled data sharing
yields up to 105% accuracy improvement on average, while also reducing the
false positive rate.Comment: A preliminary version of this paper appears in DIMVA 2015. This is
the full version. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with
arXiv:1403.212
