Volume 9, Issue 4, April – 2024 International Journal of Innovative Science and Research Technology

ISSN No:-2456-2165 https://doi.org/10.38124/ijisrt/IJISRT24APR957

AI-Driven Proactive Cloud Application

Data Access Security
Priyanka Neelakrishnan
Independent Researcher and Product Innovation Expert,
Coimbatore, India

Abstract:- The widespread adoption of cloud I. INTRODUCTION

applications, accelerated by remote work demands,
introduces new security challenges. Traditional In recent years, the explosion of cloud applications and
approaches struggle to keep pace with the growing their adoption by organizations for business continuityhas
volume of cloud applications, keeping track of their user become evident. However, this trend also brings a dark side
activities and countering potential threats. This paper where organizations lack visibility into how data in these
proposes a novel user access security system for cloud cloud applications is stored and accessed by their
applications. The system leverages user activity tracking employees, particularly as remote work becomes more
tied to user, device, and contextual identity data. By prevalent for various reasons. One challenge lies in
incorporating Identity Provider (IdP) information, visibility, while another lies in controlling access. Without
Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Machine adequate visibility, controlling access becomes impossible.
Learning algorithms (ML), the system builds user
baselines and tracks deviations to bubble up critical Another pain point that organizations face stems from
deviations to the surface and proactively prevent further the large number of incidents generated by their legacy
worsening in real-time, working in conjunction with security solutions. Incident remediators often struggle to
security orchestration, automation, and response triage these incidents, and the lack of evidential data further
(SOAR) tools. Deviations from the baselines, which may complicates forensic analysis. As a result, data breaches
indicate compromised accounts or malicious intent, may go unnoticed and become difficult to prove.
trigger proactive interventions. This approach offers
organizations superior visibility and control over their Traditional cloud application data protection security
cloud applications, enabling proactive and real-time solutions typically rely on security policies authored by
threat detection and data breach prevention. While real- cloud administrators, which specify various criteria.
time data collection from application vendors remains a Incidents are generated when these criteria are violated.
challenge, near-real-time is made feasible today. The However, a significant flaw in this approach is that there is
system can also effectively utilize IdP logs, activity logs no one-size-fits-all policy, and it's challenging to add or
from proxies, or firewalls. This research addresses the remove inclusions and exclusions from already complex
critical need for proactive security measures in the policies. Consequently, critical violations may go unnoticed,
dynamic landscape of cloud application data security. leading to data breaches. Moreover, the sheer volume of
The system will need a quarter (90 days) of learning time incidents generated in medium and large organizations on a
to ensure accurate detections based on historically daily basis often leaves them unserviced for months. Even
gathered data and protect them for future baseline when incidents are addressed, challenges such as
predictions on the user themselves and as well as on their insufficient forensic evidence, numerous low-priority
peers. This approach ensures the detection is incidents escalating to critical ones, and a lack of contextual
contextually aware of the organization as a whole. This understanding persist.
research completely redefines traditional thinking with
decentralized intelligence across the system that has a All these issues pose a serious threat to organizations,
highly scalable microservice architecture. The proposed making it difficult for them to confidently allow their
solution is a uniquely intelligent system where both employees to use cloud applications for processing sensitive
human and artificial intelligence coexist, with the and confidential data.
ultimate overriding control lying with humans (admin).
This way, the outcomes at every stage are effective, The main objective of this paper is to provide guidance
making the overall detection and proactive security and demonstrate that it is possible to implement a robust
effective. cloud data security system that proactively protects
organizational data in cloud applications while encouraging
Keywords:- Data Protection; User; Peers; Organization; employee productivity.
Machine Learning; Aggregator; Cloud Application Security.

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This paper aims to develop a novel system that with GDPR requirements, and it took several months for
leverages human and artificial intelligence for data Marriott to discover the data breach.
aggregation, correlation, context and intent derivation, and
consolidation of point solutions to effectively address the In the Twitter Bitcoin Scam of July 2020, hackers
core purpose of cloud application data protection. gained access to administrative tools via compromised
credentials of Twitter employees and posted scam messages
II. LITERATURE AND BACKGROUND SURVEY from 130 private and corporate high-profile Twitter
accounts [11], resulting in the transfer of $180,000 in
Insider threats and attacks are on the rise. Sixty-eight bitcoins to scamming accounts.
percent of organizations have observed an increase in
insider threats over the past 12 months [1], and forty-nine The Zola Hack in May 2022 involved hackers using an
percent of organizations can’t detect these threats. Even if age-old attack technique known as credential stuffing to
detected, it’s often difficult, if not impossible, to prove due breach the popular wedding planning site, Zola [12]. This
to a lack of proper forensics [2]. Compromised cloud resulted in fraudulent activity tied to customer accounts
accounts cost companies an average of $6.2 million each [13], with approximately 3,000 accounts compromised. As
year and lead to 138 hours of application downtime [3]. part of their remediation efforts, Zola temporarily disabled
Notably, sixty-two percent of data breaches are attributed to mobile apps connected to the platform, causing business
leveraged credentials, according to the Verizon Data Breach slowdowns and requiring urgent remediation efforts.
Investigation Report [4]. It takes an average of 287 days for
an organization to identify a data breach, with the average III. EXISTING SYSTEM AND UNIQUENESS OF
cost amounting to $3.86 million [5]. Types of users that THE PROPOSED SYSTEM
pose a risk include disgruntled employees, outgoing
employees, accidental exposures, corporate spies, and  Existing User Entity Behavioral Analytics (UEBA)
fraudsters. Solutions in the Market and Academic Research [14]
Lack in Four Critical High-Level Areas:
My research on the OpenDaylight Software Defined
Network (SDN) controller, conducted in 2016 [6], aimed to  It’s always hard to create a baseline due to data
improve the scalability of the architecture through corruption and lack of user data and its aggregation.
microservices running on different instances of the Even when this challenge is addressed, there are the next
controller. This research provided valuable insights for the layer of challenges. The data feed is not rich enough to
current study. Based on the findings in SDN microservice correlate the user activity across multiple applications
scaling architecture, we could employ a user activity and multiple instances of the same application. This is
microservice for a specific user across cloud application where my previous SDN research [6] helps our current
instances. This approach allows us to holistically gather user research to consolidate the data by having a specific user
activities across different applications, providing a data service run in different instances across
sophisticated user data feed and an intelligent analytic applications. Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies like
analyzer that scales both horizontally and vertically. The natural language processing and generative AI models
novel software microservice-based architecture mentioned are used to quickly connect and grasp the intent and
in the SDN research [6] significantly influenced the context of the user holistically.
architecture of the proposed cloud AI-driven data security  The analytics engine is not sophisticated enough to
system. accurately compare the user activity among themselves
and across their peers at the same given time stamp.
Several real-world case studies prompted the need for Here is where our proposed system is unique. It uses
this research, leading to the development of this paper. machine learning (ML) models to train the user data in
relation to peer data to establish a baseline, along with
In the General Electric’s Malicious Insider Case of attaching a baseline deviation score to each user action
2020, a couple of GE employees were convicted of stealing for predictions. The covalent machine learning model,
trade secrets to gain a business advantage [7]. Thousands of which has the user and peer score attached, encompasses
files were downloaded by the employees before leaving the multiple inner models like probabilistic models and
organization, without the knowledge of the GE location models that vertically scale on-demand to
cybersecurity team. It took GE several years to discover and effectively analyze and assign the activity deviation
convict them [8], and even then, proving the case took years scores. Additionally, our proposed solution also
due to a lack of forensics. incorporates feedback from the admin or traditional
policy-based services to train the ML model to
The Marriott Data Breach Case in January 2020 proactively adapt its detections.
involved hackers gaining access to a third-party application  Once existing UEBA solutions provide anomalous
through compromised credentials [9], resulting in access to scores, they do not limit and are mostly used for
Marriott guest lists containing sensitive PII information informational visibility purposes. Here, with our
[10]. Marriott was fined £18.4 million for non-compliance proposed system, we provide information for visibility
and simultaneously take real-time action to adjust

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privilege permissions for suspicious users and send saving them triaging time. This approach eliminates the
notifications to the admin and suspicious end-users via burden on the admin while allowing them to retain
email and real-time system-generated "on-the-fly Policy" overall approval/disapproval authority.
logged in the existing policy lists. When the notification  In a traditional system, there is only one analytic engine
reaches the admin in real-time, they have the option to that is intelligent with a basic ML model or rule-based
override the system-provided "on-the-fly Policy" back to model. This engine forms the core of the UEBA system.
its previous state. This approach allows malicious users However, in our proposed system, the intelligence of the
to be prevented from certain access or activities without detection engine is decentralized, making every service
blocking productivity. In the future, suspicious end-users from the ground up autonomous to enable smart work
and their managers could also be added to the for a fully intelligent system.
notification service, and the manager could be given a
justification option submitted to the admin to allow for Overall, we have established that the proposed solution
one of several scenarios in a decentralized manner, is one-of-a-kind and has been proposed for the first time.

Fig 1: AI-Driven Data Access Security System

IV. PROPOSED SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE  Activity feeder plane

 Aggregator plane
The proposed system is architecturally classified into  Analytics engine plane
four horizontal planes. In the proposed model, the  Action driver plane.
intelligence of the data processor is decentralized across all
the planes, unlike traditional single intelligent UEBA There are several services running in each of these
analytic engines. This way, the system becomes fully planes that scale both vertically and horizontally on-demand
autonomous and ready for smart work from the ground up. to avoid performance degradation during load. The services
themselves shut down and turn on as per the servicing
application and user traffic data. All of the microservices in
the system scale horizontally and vertically on-demand.

Fig 2: Automatic System Architecture

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A. Activity Feeder Plane V. METHODOLOGY

The activity feeder plane is responsible for collecting
and providing a rich data feed of the user, device, The solution runs for a solid 90 days (typically from
application, identity provider services, proxy or firewall, and the beginning of the quarter), collecting all the activities
cloud application vendor logs to the aggregator in their surrounding the entities. This ensures that unique activities
respective formats. Each entity has a service of its own that occurring at the end of the quarter are not missed.
scales, for example: user service, application service. Inside
that parent service, there are child services to support multi- In the first stage, which involves services in the
tenancy, such as device service, cloud Azure service, Okta activity feeder plane, smart microservices are trained to
service, proxy service, file manager service, file activity collect all the activities by tracking every entity along with
type service, resource creator tracker service, sensitive data the corresponding timestamps. The entities of interest
snippet service, and malware file identifier service. There is include:
a common “Time manager service” based on a large
language model (LLM) and natural language processing  User
(NLP) that collects data from each service to associate the  Files/Folders
outputs together based on the timestamp and funnel them to  Application
the Activity aggregator service.  Application Instances
 Sensitive Data Snippets
B. Activity Aggregator Plane  Malware Details
The activity aggregator plane is responsible for the  Account Details, Including Service Accounts
overall mapping to draw the user 360 associations. Key  Identity Provider Logs
mapper microservices are run in this plane, including  Identity Provider Sync (Azure Ad, Okta)
user:device mapper, user:application mapper and its child  Device Details
service user:app instance mapper, user:location mapper,  All Possible Logs From Cloud Application Vendors And
user:sensitive data snippet mapper, user: malware file Proxies.
mapper, user:file activity type mapper, and user:resource
creator tracker mapper. There is a common “Job manager The primary focus in this stage is the user and the
service” that unifies the details from the output of each of user’s interaction with all related entities. Every activity
the services to create a user and entity 360 graph with all the related to the user is thoroughly captured for processing.
user activities and their associated entities aggregated. Smart AI technologies then act on this data and create time-
based event correlations.
C. Analytics Engine Plane
The analytics engine plane is responsible for creating a In the second stage, the aggregator plane receives the
holistic user profile with hierarchy and peer profile mapper. time-correlated event logs for the entities and begins
Services like comparator, active directory hierarchy creating the user:entity mapper in the respective
collector, deviation score assigner, further probability microservices. The result of this processing is to create a
predictor, user graph enhancer, feedback collector, feedback mapper table for user interaction and to follow the data in
disperser, on-the-fly policy enforcer, notifier, and admin on- addition to the user. A consolidated user and entity graph is
the-fly policy overrider are included in this plane. The created as the output, enabling the system to track data from
analytics engine plane outputs the user risk score, entity risk its origination. This operation enhances forensics and
score, on-the-fly policy recommendations, notifications, and enables proactive security.
a forensics trail with the incident log. The entity risk score
here refers to application risk scores, file risk scores, file In the third stage, the analytics engine plane receives
activity type risk scores, device risk scores, the entity graphs and uses AD sync information to finalize
department/division risk score, role-based risk scores, and the user profile with respect to their position in the
region risk scores. organization. User role, department, region, group, and peer
information, along with their corresponding activities at the
D. Action Driver Plane same given time, are compared. This results in:
The action driver plane is responsible for taking
actions after the detailed visibility provided by the analytics  Granular user profile
engine plane. The services in this plane include on-the-fly  User and entity risk scores, comparing the user to
policy service, incident forensic viewer, and external themselves, peers, and entities
integrations like security orchestration, automation and  Evidence content for forensics
response (SOAR) system or just APIs. Bi-directional  Incidents with severity
communication is involved in case of response actions and  On-the-fly policy recommendations.
workflows. In the future, there is potential for generating
reports and having them accessible via APIs in this plane. Feedback from humans (admins) is analyzed by the
This plane is also responsible for notifying suspicious end feedback analyzer to ensure the system's accuracy and
users, their managers and admins, and managing practicality. The merge of human and system intelligence
justification approval workflows. ensures control over scoring and detection by humans

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(admins). Risk is calculated based on deviations detected in  The User/Entity Risk Model Includes:
a user/entity's normal behavior pattern. An overall risk
score, its corresponding range, and rank are computed for a  Risk Range: Critical, High, Medium, Low, Info level
user/entity based on various types of suspicious activity  User/Entity Risk Score: (0-100)%
incidents.  Risk Rank: user rank/number of employees in the
organization
 Peer Risk Score: (0-100)%.

Risk scores are computed in a human-understandable

percentage format (0-100)%, with risk range categorization
for plain English interpretation.

Fig 3: Key Outcomes from Analytics Engine Plane

In the fourth stage, the action driver plane is and Box, later uploading them to their personal Google
responsible for taking control actions based on the visibility Drive from a managed device.
and recommendations provided by the analytics engine  Admin gets notified of suspicious user activities - By
plane. This is where the response actions, involving write- having both the employee's profile and their group, the
to-left communication in the system, are initiated. For normalcy-deviation detector (without any policies)
instance, once a policy is enforced, the notification of the tracks activities across corporate applications and flags
incident is sent to the suspicious end user, their manager, the user as suspicious, thereby identifying malicious
with the option to provide justification, and the admin to insiders.
approve or revoke the on-the-fly policy in real-time.  Multiple devices using the same credentials to access
corporate apps - Several employees from the same
 Here are Some of the Key Use Cases the System department and region access Salesforce corporate
Effectively Addresses. applications using the credentials of the same local
account.
 Potential Attacker Identification - As a cloud admin, I’d  Manager gets notified of compromised account - Having
like to detect and prevent potential attacks to ensure our device-to-user mapping, the normalcy-deviation detector
organization's data in the cloud remains secure. (without any preset policies) tracks Salesforce
 User Access Privilege Misuse Identification - As a cloud application access from different devices using the same
admin, I’d like to identify and stop unnecessary local account and flags this as a compromised account.
privileges given to certain users and restore them to their The manager of the group gets notified, necessitating
peer norms. them to deprovision the account to mitigate potential
 Malicious insider stealing data from multiple corporate risks.
applications - An employee exfiltrates data by  Malicious data accesses go undetected - Employees use
downloading a large number of files from Google Drive their valid credentials to exfiltrate data; ex-employees

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still use unprovisioned accounts to gain access; attackers A. Compromised Accounts (Credential Theft):
use valid user accounts to access corporate applications.
 Visibility to admin - Risk score-based top risky users -  Local Accounts - Several employees from the same
ML-driven analytics engine tracks user activities across department and region access the Salesforce corporate
all SaaS applications. Based on this, every user in the application using the credentials of the same local
organization receives a risk score indicating their risk to account. Leaving loose ends would mean the employee,
the organization. The admin gains visibility on top risky even after leaving the organization, could access that
users, and policy recommendations are provided to local account with the known shared credentials.
monitor the risky users accessing applications, which the  Is Uma really Uma? - Uma usually accesses the Box
admin can enforce in a single click. application from San Jose, California, between the hours
 Remote employee accesses corporate data - An of 8 am and 6 pm. A hacker, who claims to be Uma, with
employee accesses corporate applications from a new her stolen credentials accesses the same Box application
remote location using their managed device. from a different location (never accessed by Uma from
 Instant incident remediation with SOAR - The this location based on her past history) at an unusual
behavioral analytics engine flags the user as suspicious. time.
SaaS security directly integrated with SOAR
automatically executes a playbook to notify both the B. Privilege Misuse (Privileged User Threats):
employee and their manager about this incident. The
manager remediates the incident by providing a response  Activity Type - Losh, who is part of the HR
action as a false positive with justification that the user organization, usually can view the salary data of all
has moved to this new remote location. employees. She also has the additional privilege to copy.
 Malware attacker goes unrestrained - An employee Losh copies the salary information of select employees
continuously uploads malware files to a corporate in the Sales organization, differing from the behavior of
application. The system immediately blocks the attacker her peers.
and enables the admin for future decisions. The analytics  Application Access - Neela from the engineering
engine has already flagged this user as “high” risk. division has access to all corporate applications in the
Additionally, the engine notifies this specific user organization. One fine day, Neela accesses the
uploading malware content to the corporate application, Salesforce application to view the quarterly report,
makes a policy recommendation, and enforces blocking differing from her peers in the engineering department.
the user from further accessing that corporate app. The
admin reviews this enforcement and allows or revokes C. Data Exfiltration (Data Theft):
this policy in a single click. Bulk Activity - Pranesh has tendered his resignation.
Now, Pranesh downloads marketing documents from
VI. IMPLEMENTATION AND RESULTS different corporate applications, which is unusual behavior
compared to his baseline behavior. He intends to use this
The overall system implementation is done using the information in his next job.
Java programming language, and machine learning models,
largelanguage models, and natural language processing are D. Sensitive Data Exfiltration (Data Breaches):
used across the system, working and interacting along with
the databases and the microservices. These models utilize a  Extensive Sensitive Data Access -Viji, who is a Bank
range of methodologies starting with probability manager, downloads all customer PII data from
distribution, neural networks, and feedback correlator, and corporate GDrive.
subsequent decorrelator to ensure the models are more  Broader Sensitive Data Access - Perumal is an employee
robust and accurate. Following are the key scenarios for in the HR department who, as part of his job duties, had
testing: to access employees' SSN. Suddenly, we see Perumal
accessing the source code and HIPAA content. This is a
deviation from his usual sensitive content access, which
is SSN.

The system creates entity details, which are the

outcomes of the analytics engine plane. Figure 4 illustrates
the fundamentals of user details, which also stack ranks the
entity with respect to their peers. Figure 5 showcases how
the incidents change over time as the system learns and
adapts the detection.

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Fig 4: User/Entity Details

Fig 5: Incident Trend over a Time Period

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 Key Outcomes of the System are as Follows:

 File Count Deviation - Data Exfiltration/Suspicious Data Activity Type, Current File Counts, Expected Value,
Access (Volume Deviation) - App Instance Name, Risk Score, View Log.

Fig 6: User Activity Table for Data Access

Fig 7: User and Peer Comparison Graphs for Data Access

 File Activity Type Deviation - Privilege Applications Deviation) - App Instance Name, Current
Misuse/Suspicious Activity Type Access and Suspicious Activity Types/Applications Value, Expected Value,
Application Access (Activity Type Deviation, Risk Score.

Fig 8: User Activity Table for Activity Type Access

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Fig 9: User and Peer Comparison Graphs for Activity Type Access

 Application Access Deviation - Privilege Applications Deviation) - App Instance Name, Current
Misuse/Suspicious Activity Type Access and Suspicious Activity Types/Applications Value, Expected Value,
Application Access (Activity Type Deviation, Risk Score.

Fig 10: User Activity Table for Application Access

Fig 11: User and Peer Comparison Graphs for Application Access

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 Location and Time Deviation - Compromised Current Value (Time, Location, Device), Expected
Account/Suspicious Logins (Time Deviation, Location Value, Risk Score, View Logs.
Deviation, Device Deviation) - App Instance Name,

Fig 12: User Activity Table for Time and Location Access

Fig 13: User and Peer Comparison Graphs for Time and Location Access

 Sensitive Data Access Deviation - Sensitive Data Type, Current Value (Files/Messages/Entity), Expected
Exfiltration/Suspicious Sensitive Content Access (Data Value, Risk Score, View Log (this will include Time,
Patterns and Profiles) - App Instance Name, Activity Location, File/Entity Name, Sensitive Data Content).

Fig 14: User Activity Table for Sensitive Data Access

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Fig 15: User and Peer Comparison Graphs for Sensitive Data Access

VII. CONCLUSION REFERENCES

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PRIYANKA NEELAKRISHNAN, was born on December 20, 1990. She holds a Bachelor of
Engineering degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from Anna University, Chennai,
Tamil Nadu, India (2012); a Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering with a focus on
Computer Networks and Network Security from San Jose State University, San Jose, California, United
States (2016); and a Master of Business Administration degree in General Management from San Jose
State University, San Jose, California, United States (2020). Currently, Priyanka works as a Product Line
Manager, Independent Researcher, and Product Innovator, specializing in driving product innovation and
development. Previously, she has held positions as a Senior Product Manager and Senior Software
Development Engineer at reputable cybersecurity firms.

Priyanka Neelakrishnan is also an accomplished author, having penned the book titled “Problem Pioneering: A Product
Manager’s Guide to Crafting Compelling Solutions”. She is currently in the process of writing another book focusing on
cybersecurity.

IJISRT24APR957 www.ijisrt.com 521