TerminAPTor: Highlighting Advanced Persistent Threats through Information Flow Tracking

Long lived attack campaigns known as Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) have emerged as a serious security risk. These attack campaigns are customised for their target and performed step by step during months on end. The major difficulty in detecting an APT is keeping track of the different steps logged over months of monitoring and linking them. In this article, we describe TerminAPTor, an APT detector which highlights the traces left by attackers in the monitored system during the different stages of an attack campaign. TerminAPTor tackles this challenge by resorting to Information Flow Tracking (IFT). Our main contribution is showing that IFT can be used to highlight APTs. Additionally, we describe a generic representation of APTs and validate our IFT-based APT detector.