Measuring and visualizing cyber threat intelligence quality

• Published in: International journal of information security Vol. 20; no. 1; pp. 21 - 38
• Main Authors: Schlette, Daniel, Böhm, Fabian, Caselli, Marco, Pernul, Günther
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin/Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 01.02.2021; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Coding and Information Theory; Collaboration; Communications Engineering; Computer Communication Networks; Computer Science; Cryptology; Cybersecurity; Decision analysis; Intelligence gathering; Management of Computing and Information Systems; Networks; Operating Systems; Quality assessment; Quality control; Regular Contribution; Subject specialists; Threat evaluation; Data quality; Threat intelligence formats; Cyber threat intelligence; Threat intelligence sharing; Information security visualization
• ISSN: 1615-5262; 1615-5270
• DOI: 10.1007/s10207-020-00490-y

The very raison d’être of cyber threat intelligence (CTI) is to provide meaningful knowledge about cyber security threats. The exchange and collaborative generation of CTI by the means of sharing platforms has proven to be an important aspect of practical application. It is evident to infer that inaccurate, incomplete, or outdated threat intelligence is a major problem as only high-quality CTI can be helpful to detect and defend against cyber attacks. Additionally, while the amount of available CTI is increasing it is not warranted that quality remains unaffected. In conjunction with the increasing number of available CTI, it is thus in the best interest of every stakeholder to be aware of the quality of a CTI artifact. This allows for informed decisions and permits detailed analyses. Our work makes a twofold contribution to the challenge of assessing threat intelligence quality. We first propose a series of relevant quality dimensions and configure metrics to assess the respective dimensions in the context of CTI. In a second step, we showcase the extension of an existing CTI analysis tool to make the quality assessment transparent to security analysts. Furthermore, analysts’ subjective perceptions are, where necessary, included in the quality assessment concept.