Numerical Representations of Internet Hosts and Network Signatures

OVERVIEW

• Can be used to perform scalable analysis of entities on the Internet
• Available open source under MIT license

BACKGROUND

The development of open-source network scanners provides researchers and security/network analysts with large amounts of raw information on arbitrary hosts on the Internet, including web servers, routers, webcams, and so forth. These measurements can be used to reveal misconfigurations, uncover hosts susceptible to specific software vulnerabilities, or collect statistics and trends on usage of various protocols and technologies. 

INNOVATION

Researchers at the University of Michigan have utilized deep learning methods to develop a methodology and an associated process for converting raw information about Internet hosts to low-dimensional numerical embeddings (representations), and propose techniques for aggregating these embeddings at the network level to obtain numerical fingerprints (signatures) of entities on the Internet (e.g. autonomous systems or organizational networks).

ADDITIONAL DETAILS

The code can be accessed in GitHub repositories, located at either of the following sites: 

https://github.com/arsarabi/jsonvectorizer

https://github.com/arsarabi/vae