Tracing the Chain: Deep Learning for Stepping-Stone Intrusion Detection
Stepping-stone intrusions (SSIs) are a prevalent network evasion technique in which attackers route sessions through chains of compromised intermediate hosts to obscure their origin. Effective SSI detection requires correlating the incoming and outgoing flows at each relay host at extremely low false positive rates -- a stringent requirement that renders classical statistical methods inadequate in operational settings. We apply ESPRESSO, a deep learning flow correlation model combining a transformer-based feature extraction network, time-aligned multi-channel interval features, and online triplet metric learning, to the problem of stepping-stone intrusion detection. To support training an...
| Authors | Nate Mathews, Nicholas Hopper, Matthew Wright |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CR |
| Published | 9 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 9 April 2026 |
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