FORGE: A Fake Online Repository Generation Engine for Cyber Deception

Today, major corporations and government organizations must face the reality that they will be hacked by malicious actors. In this paper, we consider the case of defending enterprises that have been successfully hacked by imposing additional a posteriori costs on the attacker. Our idea is simple: for every real document d, we develop methods to automatically generate a set Fake(d) of fake documents that are very similar to d. The attacker who steals documents must wade through a large number of documents in detail in order to separate the real one from the fakes. Our FORGE system focuses on technical documents (e.g. engineering/design documents) and involves three major innovations. First, we represent the semantic content of documents via multi-layer graphs (MLGs). Second, we propose a novel concept of “meta-centrality” for multi-layer graphs. Our third innovation is to show that the problem of generating the set Fake(d) of fakes can be viewed as an optimization problem. We prove that this problem is NP-complete and then develop efficient heuristics to solve it in practice. We ran detailed experiments with a panel of 20 human subjects and show that FORGE generates highly believable fakes.