Explainable Machine Learning for Intrusion Detection via Hardware Performance Counters

The exponential proliferation of Malware over the past decade has threatened system security across a plethora of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Furthermore, the improvements in computer architectures to include speculative branching and out-of-order executions have engendered new opportunities for adversaries to carry out microarchitectural attacks in these devices. Both Malware and microarchitectural attacks are imperative threats to computing systems, as their behaviors range from stealing sensitive data to total system failure. With the cat-and-mouse game between Anti-Virus Software (AVS) and attackers, the frequent bolstering of AVS induces large computational overhead. Consequently, hardware performance counter (HPC)-based detection strategies augmented with machine learning (ML) classifiers have gained popularity as a low overhead solution in identifying these malicious threats. However, ML models are operated as black boxes, which results in decisions that are not human understandable. Clarity of the models’ results facilitates the development of more robust systems. Existing explainable frameworks are only capable of determining each feature’s impact on a prediction which does not provide meaningful interpretable outcomes for HPC-based intrusion detection. In this article, we address this issue by proposing an explainable HPC-based double regression (HPCDR) ML framework. Our proposed technique provides relevant transparency through isolation of the most malevolent transient window of an application, thereby allowing a user to efficiently locate the pernicious instructions within the program. We evaluated HPCDR on five microarchitectural attacks and two Malware. HPCDR was successfully able to identify the most malicious function manifested in each intrusive application.