IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems
Online ISSN : 1745-1361
Print ISSN : 0916-8532
Special Section on Information and Communication System Security
File Tracking and Visualization Methods Using a Network Graph to Prevent Information Leakage
Tomohiko YANOHiroki KUZUNOKenichi MAGATA
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2023 Volume E106.D Issue 9 Pages 1339-1353

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Abstract

Information leakage is a significant threat to organizations, and effective measures are required to protect information assets. As confidential files can be leaked through various paths, a countermeasure is necessary to prevent information leakage from various paths, from simple drag-and-drop movements to complex transformations such as encryption and encoding. However, existing methods are difficult to take countermeasures depending on the information leakage paths. Furthermore, it is also necessary to create a visualization format that can find information leakage easily and a method that can remove unnecessary parts while leaving the necessary parts of information leakage to improve visibility. This paper proposes a new information leakage countermeasure method that incorporates file tracking and visualization. The file tracking component recursively extracts all events related to confidential files. Therefore, tracking is possible even when data have transformed significantly from the original file. The visualization component represents the results of file tracking as a network graph. This allows security administrators to find information leakage even if a file is transformed through multiple events. Furthermore, by pruning the network graph using the frequency of past events, the indicators of information leakage can be more easily found by security administrators. In experiments conducted, network graphs were generated for two information leakage scenarios in which files were moved and copied. The visualization results were obtained according to the scenarios, and the network graph was pruned to reduce vertices by 17.6% and edges by 10.9%.

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© 2023 The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers
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