EDGE: An enticing deceptive-content generator as defensive deception

Abstract

Cyber deception defense mitigates Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) with deploying deceptive entities, such as the Honeyfile. The Honeyfile distracts attackers from valuable digital documents and attracts unauthorized access by deliberately exposing fake content. The effectiveness of distraction and trap lies in the enticement of fake content. However, existing studies on the Honeyfile focus less on this perspective. In this work, we seek to improve the enticement of fake text content through enhancing its readability, indistinguishability, and believability. Hence, an enticing deceptive-content generator, EDGE, is presented. The EDGE is constructed with three steps: extracting key concepts with a semantics-aware K-means clustering algorithm, searching for candidate deceptive concepts within the Word2Vec model, and generating deceptive text content under the Integrated Readability Index (IR). Furthermore, the readability and believability performance analyses are undertaken. The experimental results show that EDGE generates indistinguishable deceptive text content without decreasing readability. In all, EDGE proves effective to generate enticing deceptive text content as deception defense against APTs.