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AI Case Study

ProofPoint Evasion - AI Case Study

Proof Pudding (CVE-2019-20634) is a code repository that describes how ML researchers evaded ProofPoint's email protection system by first building a copy-cat email protection ML model, and using the insights to bypass the live system. More specifically, the insights allowed researchers to craft malicious emails that received preferable scores, going undetected by the system. Each word in an email is scored numeri...

ExerciseProofPoint Email Protection SystemResearchers at Silent Break SecurityAI Attack StagingDiscoveryAI Model Access

Overview

Case steps5Steps described in the case record.
Techniques5Attack methods mentioned in the case steps.
Linked CVEs1Known vulnerabilities mentioned in the record.

Risk patterns

Patterns found in the case record and its linked vulnerabilities.

  • 1Dominant ATLAS tactic. AI Attack Staging appears in 2 case steps.
  • 2Multiple attack methods. The case connects to 5 unique AI attack methods.
  • 3Vulnerability mentions. The record connects 1 vulnerability identifiers to this case.

Procedure timeline

Search the case steps or filter them by attacker goal.

AI Attack Staging2Discovery1AI Model Access1Impact1
  1. AI Attack Staging

    The researchers used the emails and collected scores as a dataset, which they used to train a functional copy of the ProofPoint model. Basic correlation was used to decide which score variable speaks generally about the security of an email. The "mlxlogscore" was selected in this case due to its relationship with spam, phish, and core mlx and was used as the label. Each "mlxlogscore" was generally between 1 and 999 (higher score = safer sample). Training was performed using an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and Bag of Words tokenizing.

  2. AI Attack Staging

    Next, the ML researchers algorithmically found samples from this "offline" proxy model that helped give desired insight into its behavior and influential variables. Examples of good scoring samples include "calculation", "asset", and "tyson". Examples of bad scoring samples include "software", "99", and "unsub".

  3. Impact

    Finally, these insights from the "offline" proxy model allowed the researchers to create malicious emails that received preferable scores from the real ProofPoint email protection system, hence bypassing it.

Mitigations

Defenses connected to the attack methods in this case.

Sources

Original public records and references for this case.

Original source

Original source links

Open the MITRE ATLAS data and public references used for this case study.