Image-based Insider Threat Detection via Geometric Transformation

Abstract: Insider threat detection has been a challenging task over decades, existing approaches generally employ the traditional generative unsupervised learning methods to produce normal user behavior model and detect significant deviations as anomalies. However, such approaches are insufficient in precision and computational complexity. In this paper, we propose a novel insider threat detection method, Image-based Insider Threat Detector via Geometric Transformation (IGT), which converts the unsupervised anomaly detection into supervised image classification task, and therefore the performance can be boosted via computer vision techniques. To illustrate, our IGT uses a novel image-based feature representation of user behavior by transforming audit logs into grayscale images. By applying multiple geometric transformations on these behavior grayscale images, IGT constructs a self-labelled dataset and then train a behavior classifier to detect anomaly in self-supervised manner. The motivation behind our proposed method is that images converted from normal behavior data may contain unique latent features which keep unchanged after geometric transformation, while malicious ones cannot. Experimental results on CERT dataset show IGT outperforms the classical autoencoder-based unsupervised insider threat detection approaches, and improves the instance and user based Area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve (AUROC) by 4% and 2%, respectively.