SPGNN-API: A Transferable Graph Neural Network for Attack Paths Identification and Autonomous Mitigation

Houssem Jmal, Firas Ben Hmida, Nardine Basta, Muhammad Ikram, Mohamad Ali Kâafar, Andy Walker

Abstract: Attack paths are the potential chain of malicious activities an attacker performs to compromise network assets and acquire privileges through exploiting network vulnerabilities. Attack path analysis helps organizations to identify new/unknown chains of attack vectors exposing critical assets, as opposed to individual attack vectors in signature-based attack analysis. Timely identification of attack paths enables proactive mitigation of threats. Nevertheless, manual analysis of complex network configurations, vulnerabilities, and security events to identify attack paths is rarely feasible. This work proposes a novel transferable graph neural network-based model for shortest path identification. The shortest path, integrated with a novel holistic model for identifying potential network vulnerabilities interactions, is then utilized to detect network attack paths. Our framework automates the risk assessment of attack paths indicating the propensity of the paths to enable the compromise of highly-critical assets (e.g., databases). The proposed framework, named SPGNN-API, incorporates automated threat mitigation through a proactive timely tuning of the network firewall rules and Zero-Trust (ZT) policies to break critical attack paths and bolster cyber defenses. Our evaluation process is twofold; evaluating the performance of the shortest path identification and assessing the attack path detection accuracy. Our results show that SPGNN-API largely outperforms the baseline model for shortest path identification with an average accuracy $\geq95$ % and successfully detects 100% of the potentially compromised assets, outperforming the attack graph baseline by 47%.