Detection of malicious behavior in a large network is a challenging problem for machine learning in computer security, since it requires a model with high expressive power and scalable inference. Existing solutions struggle to achieve this feat—current cybersec-tailored approaches are still limited in expressivity, and methods successful in other domains do not scale well for large volumes of data, rendering frequent retraining impossible. This work proposes a new perspective for learning from graph data that is modeling network entity interactions as a large heterogeneous graph. High expressivity of the method is achieved with neural network architecture HMILnet that naturally models this type of data and provides theoretical guarantees. The scalability is achieved by pursuing local graph inference, i.e., classifying individual vertices and their neighborhood as independent samples. Our experiments exhibit improvement over the state-of-the-art Probabilistic Threat Propagation (PTP) algorithm, show a further threefold accuracy improvement when additional data is used, which is not possible with the PTP algorithm, and demonstrate the generalization capabilities of the method to new, previously unseen entities.

Standard machine learning (ML) problems are formulated on data converted into a suitable tensor representation. However, there are data sources, for example in cybersecurity, that are naturally represented in a unifying hierarchical structure, such as XML, JSON, and Protocol Buffers. Converting this data to a tensor representation is usually done by manual feature engineering, which is laborious, lossy, and prone to bias originating from the human inability to correctly judge the importance of particular features. JsonGrinder.jl is a library automating various ML tasks on these difficult sources. Starting with an arbitrary set of JSON samples, it automatically creates a differentiable ML model (called hmilnet), which embeds raw JSON samples into a fixed-size tensor representation. This embedding network can be naturally extended by an arbitrary ML model expecting tensor inputs in order to perform classification, regression, or clustering.