Differentiating User Authentication Graphs

Authentication using centralized methods is a primary trust mechanism within most large-scale, enterprise computer networks. This paper proposes using graphs to represent user authentication activity within the network. Using this mechanism over a real enterprise network dataset, we find that non-privileged users and users with system administration privileges have distinguishable graph attributes in terms of size and complexity. In addition, we find that user authentication graphs provide intuitive insights into network user behavior. We believe that understanding these differences in even greater detail will lead to improved user behavior profiling and the elusive detection of authentication credential misuse.