Cloudy with a Chance of Anomalies: Dynamic Graph Neural Network for Early Detection of Cloud Services' User Anomalies

Ensuring the security of cloud environments is imperative for sustaining organizational growth and operational efficiency. As the ubiquity of cloud services continues to rise, the inevitability of cyber threats underscores the importance of preemptive detection. This paper introduces a pioneering time-based embedding approach for Cloud Services Graph-based Anomaly Detection (CS-GAD), utilizing a Graph Neural Network (GNN) to discern anomalous user behavior during interactions with cloud services. Our method employs a dynamic tripartite graph representation to encapsulate the evolving interactions among cloud services, users, and their activities over time. Leveraging GNN models in each time frame, our approach generates a graph embedding wherein each user is assigned a score based on their historical activity, facilitating the identification of unusual behavior. Results demonstrate a notable reduction in false positive rates (2-9%) compared to prevailing methods, coupled with a commendable true positive rate (100%). The contributions of this work encompass early detection capabilities, a low false positive rate, an innovative tripartite graph representation incorporating action types, the introduction of a new cloud services dataset featuring various user attacks, and an open-source implementation for community collaboration in advancing cloud service security.