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Multi-Axis Trust Modeling for Interpretable Account Hijacking Detection

arXiv cs.AI / 3/17/2026

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Key Points

  • The work introduces a Hadith-inspired multi-axis trust modeling framework for interpretable account-hijacking detection, mapping five trust axes (long-term integrity, behavioral precision, contextual continuity, cumulative reputation, and anomaly evidence) into 26 behavioral features.
  • It adds lightweight temporal features to capture short-horizon changes across consecutive activity windows, enhancing the trust-based representation.
  • Experiments on the CLUE-LDS cloud activity dataset with injected hijacking show a Random Forest using the trust features achieving near-perfect detection and substantially outperforming models based on raw event counts, simple baselines, and unsupervised anomaly detection.
  • On the CERT Insider Threat datasets with extreme imbalance and sparse malicious behavior, temporal features improve ROC-AUC (0.776 to 0.844) and PR-AUC (0.072 to 0.264), and provide robust gains in leakage-controlled scenarios (ROC-AUC 0.627 to 0.715).

Abstract

This paper proposes a Hadith-inspired multi-axis trust modeling framework, motivated by a structurally analogous problem in classical Hadith scholarship: assessing the trustworthiness of information sources using interpretable, multidimensional criteria rather than a single anomaly score. We translate five trust axes - long-term integrity (adalah), behavioral precision (dabt), contextual continuity (isnad), cumulative reputation, and anomaly evidence - into a compact set of 26 semantically meaningful behavioral features for user accounts. In addition, we introduce lightweight temporal features that capture short-horizon changes in these trust signals across consecutive activity windows. We evaluate the framework on the CLUE-LDS cloud activity dataset with injected account hijacking scenarios. On 23,094 sliding windows, a Random Forest trained on the trust features achieves near-perfect detection performance, substantially outperforming models based on raw event counts, minimal statistical baselines, and unsupervised anomaly detection. Temporal features provide modest but consistent gains on CLUE-LDS, confirming their compatibility with the static trust representation. To assess robustness under more challenging conditions, we further evaluate the approach on the CERT Insider Threat Test Dataset r6.2, which exhibits extreme class imbalance and sparse malicious behavior. On a 500-user CERT subset, temporal features improve ROC-AUC from 0.776 to 0.844. On a leakage-controlled 4,000-user configuration, temporal modeling yields a substantial and consistent improvement over static trust features alone (ROC-AUC 0.627 to 0.715; PR-AUC 0.072 to 0.264).