Controlled Data Sharing for Collaborative Predictive Blacklisting

Although data sharing 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. We investigate whether collaborative threat mitigation can be realized via controlled data sharing. With such an approach, organizations make informed decisions as to whether or not to share data, and how much. We propose using cryptographic tools for entities to estimate the benefits of collaboration and agree on what to share without having to disclose their datasets (i.e., in a privacy-preserving way). We focus on collaborative predictive blacklisting: 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.