Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) aims to improve the transparency of machine learning (ML) pipelines. We systematize the increasingly growing (but fragmented) microcosm of studies that develop and utilize XAI methods for defensive and offensive cybersecurity tasks. We identify 3 cybersecurity stakeholders, i.e., model users, designers, and adversaries, who utilize XAI for 4 distinct objectives within an ML pipeline, namely 1) XAI-enabled user assistance, 2) XAI-enabled model verification, 3) explanation verification & robustness, and 4) offensive use of explanations. Our analysis of the literature indicates that many of the XAI applications are designed with little understanding of how they might be integrated into analyst workflows – user studies for explanation evaluation are conducted in only 14% of the cases. The security literature sometimes also fails to disentangle the role of the various stakeholders, e.g., by providing explanations to model users and designers while also exposing them to adversaries. Additionally, the role of model designers is particularly minimized in the security literature. To this end, we present an illustrative tutorial for model designers, demonstrating how XAI can help with model verification. We also discuss scenarios where interpretability by design may be a better alternative. The systematization and the tutorial enable us to challenge several assumptions, and present open problems that can help shape the future of XAI research within cybersecurity.@en

These days more companies are shifting towards using cloud environments to provide their services to their client. While it is easy to set up a cloud environment, it is equally important to monitor the system's runtime behaviour and identify anomalous behaviours that occur during its operation. In recent years, the utilisation of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) and Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to detect anomalies that might occur during runtime has been a trending approach. However, it is unclear how to explain the decisions made by these networks and how these networks should be interpreted to understand the runtime behaviour that they model. On the contrary, state machine models provide an easier manner to interpret and understand the behaviour that they model. In this work, we propose an approach that learns state machine models to model the runtime behaviour of a cloud environment that runs multiple microservice applications. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that tries to apply state machine models to microservice architectures. The state machine model is used to detect the different types of attacks that we launch on the cloud environment. From our experiment results, our approach can detect the attacks very well, achieving a balanced accuracy of 99.2% and a F1 score of 0.982. @en

The microservice architecture allows developers to divide the core functionality of their software system into multiple smaller services. However, this architectural style also makes it harder for them to debug and assess whether the system's deployment conforms to its implementation. We present CATMA, an automated tool that detects non-conformances between the system's deployment and implementation. It automatically visualizes and generates potential interpretations for the detected discrepancies. Our evaluation of CATMA shows promising results in terms of performance and providing useful insights. CATMA is available at https://cyber-analytics.nl/catma.github.io/, and a demonstration video is available at https://youtu.be/WKP1hG-TDKc.@en

The microservice architecture allows developers to divide the core functionality of their software system into multiple smaller services. However, this architectural style also makes it harder for them to debug and assess whether the system's deployment conforms to its implementation. We present CATMA, an automated tool that detects non-conformances between the system's deployment and implementation. It automatically visualizes and generates potential interpretations for the detected discrepancies. Our evaluation of CATMA shows promising results in terms of performance and providing useful insights. CATMA is available at https://cyber-analytics.nl/catma.github.io/, and a demonstration video is available at https://youtu.be/WKP1hG-TDKc.@en