ProvTalk: Towards Interpretable Multi-level Provenance Analysis in Networking Functions Virtualization (NFV)
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Network functions virtualization (NFV) enables agile deployment of network services on top of clouds. However, as NFV involves multiple levels of abstraction representing the same components, pinpointing the root cause of security incidents can become challenging. For instance, a security incident may be detected at a different level from where its root cause operations were conducted with no obvious link between the two. Moreover, existing provenance analysis techniques may produce results that are impractically large for human analysts to interpret due to the inherent complexity of NFV. In this paper, we propose ProvTalk, a provenance analysis system that handles the unique multi-level nature of NFV and assists the analyst to identify the root cause of security incidents. Specifically, we first define a multi-level provenance model to capture the dependencies between NFV levels. Next, we improve the interpretability through three novel techniques, i.e., multi-level pruning, mining-based aggregation, and rule-based natural language translation. We implement ProvTalk on a Tacker-OpenStack NFV platform and validate its effectiveness based on real-world security incidents. We demonstrate that ProvTalk captures management API calls issued to all NFV services, and produces more interpretable results by significantly reducing the size of the provenance graphs (about 3.6 times reduction via the multi-level pruning scheme and two times reduction via the aggregation scheme). Our user studies show that ProvTalk facilitates the analysis task of real-world users by generating more interpretable results.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it