The Exclusion Ratchet: False-Positive Suppression Accumulates and Persists in Detection Rule Repositories

📅 2026-08-31
📈 Citations: 0
Influential: 0
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🤖 AI Summary
研究解决了检测规则库中假阳性抑制累积和持续的问题,通过语义检测方法衡量了九年间8,234次修订中的抑制增长情况。
📝 Abstract
When a rule produces too many false alarms an analyst adds an exclusion, and the rule thereafter declines to alert in that circumstance. Each such decision is locally reasonable; what becomes of them collectively is not known. Recent longitudinal work established that curation does not converge, but measured restoration time only for revisions that were later reverted -- a measure silent about narrowing that is never undone. We measure that. Across nine years and 8,234 revisions of the SigmaHQ corpus we detect suppression semantically -- growth in the set of predicates held under negation without compensating growth in coverage -- and validate it against blinded hand labelling (precision 0.828, recall 0.911). The test is deterministic: nothing is learned from the data, and the definitions are released as code. Exclusions were added 1,642 times and withdrawn 304, a ratio of 5.4 to 1 that rises to 13 to 1 at the level of the individual rule. Thirty-one per cent of the narrowing is invisible to structural comparison, which existing structural accounts therefore undercount. Estimated by Kaplan-Meier, 86.7 per cent of exclusions remain in force three years on, and persistence is independent of whether the rule is the only coverage for its ATT&CK technique (p = 0.49). Of path-valued exclusions, 64.1 per cent can be satisfied by an unprivileged process that chooses a filename. Narrowing accumulates, is rarely revisited, and is not triaged by consequence. We give a criterion for deciding which exclusions to examine first.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

false-positive suppression
detection rule repositories
exclusion ratchet
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

false-positive suppression
semantic detection
exclusion persistence
SigmaHQ corpus
S
Sudaroli Dhananjeyan
Independent Researcher, Bengaluru, India
K
Kumaran U
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Amrita School of Computing, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Bengaluru, India