Practical Attacks Against Graph-based Clustering

Yizheng Chen, Yacin Nadji, Athanasios Kountouras, Fabian Monrose, Roberto Perdisci, Manos Antonakakis, Nikolaos Vasiloglou
ACM SIGSAC conference on Computer & communications security, 2017

Graph modeling allows numerous security problems to be tackled in a general way, however, little work has been done to understand their ability to withstand adversarial attacks. We design and evaluate two novel graph attacks against a state-of-the-art networklevel, graph-based detection system. Our work highlights areas in adversarial machine learning that have not yet been addressed, specifically: graph-based clustering techniques, and a global feature space where realistic attackers without perfect knowledge must be accounted for (by the defenders) in order to be practical. Even though less informed attackers can evade graph clustering with low cost, we show that some practical defenses are possible.