Enterprise Threat Event Augmentation With Bloom Filter Deduplication

Resolve Bottlenecks,
Find Innovative Solutions
Generate Solutions

Solution Overview

Problem

Enterprise networks face challenges in efficiently monitoring and investigating sophisticated security threats due to their complexity, requiring improved techniques for recording, deduplicating, and analyzing security events.

Innovation Solution

A data lake system is created for enterprise security, utilizing an asynchronous stream of security events, with deduplication and metadata augmentation through bloom filters, and schema organization to facilitate monitoring and analysis, along with endpoint instrumentation for enhanced threat detection and visualization.

Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles

VSEngineering Contradiction Analysis

1Quantity of substance

If a data lake system stores all security events from enterprise networks, then the quantity of security data is increased, but the complexity of monitoring and investigating threats increases

Engineering Contradiction:
Improvequantity of security event dataVSAvoidcomplexity of threat monitoring and investigation
Core Design Contradiction:
Quantity of substanceVSDevice complexity

Solution Approach 1:

The patent segments security event data by organizing it into multiple data lakes according to different schemas and security functions. Each data lake contains specific types of security events organized by particular schemas, allowing the system to divide the large volume of security data into manageable, organized segments that can be monitored and investigated more efficiently

Inventive Principle:
Principle #1Segmentation

Solution Approach 2:

The patent introduces bloom filters as an intermediary mechanism between raw security events and the data lake storage system. These probabilistic data structures enable efficient deduplication by quickly identifying potential duplicates before full storage, reducing the actual quantity of unique security events that need to be stored and processed while maintaining data integrity

Inventive Principle:
Principle #24Intermediary (Mediator)

2Reliability

If security events are deduplicated using traditional methods, then duplicate removal is achieved, but the processing time and computational resources increase

Engineering Contradiction:
Improveaccuracy of duplicate removalVSAvoidprocessing time for deduplication
Core Design Contradiction:
ReliabilityVSLoss of time

Solution Approach 1:

The patent applies bloom filters as a preliminary filtering step before performing full deduplication checks. The bloom filter provides a probabilistic but fast preliminary assessment of whether an event is a duplicate, allowing the system to quickly eliminate obvious duplicates without performing computationally expensive full comparisons, thus reducing overall processing time while maintaining high deduplication accuracy

Inventive Principle:
Principle #10Preliminary action

Solution Approach 2:

The patent replaces traditional mechanical deduplication methods (such as exact matching algorithms and full data comparisons) with probabilistic bloom filter-based detection. This substitution uses probabilistic mathematics rather than deterministic mechanical comparison, dramatically reducing computational complexity and processing time while maintaining acceptable accuracy for security event deduplication

Inventive Principle:
Principle #28Mechanics substitution (Replace mechanical system)

3Ease of operation

If security events are organized with multiple schemas and metadata, then the ease of monitoring and analysis is improved, but the device complexity increases

Engineering Contradiction:
Improveease of security monitoring and analysisVSAvoidcomplexity of data organization system
Core Design Contradiction:
Ease of operationVSDevice complexity

Solution Approach 1:

The patent applies different schemas to different data lakes based on their specific security functions and monitoring requirements. Rather than imposing a single complex universal schema, each data lake is organized with the specific schema and metadata structure that best suits its particular security monitoring purpose, making each individual data lake easier to monitor and analyze while the overall system remains manageable through this localized approach

Inventive Principle:
Principle #3Local quality

Data Source

PatentUS12468848B2Data augmentation for threat investigation in an enterprise network
Publication Date: 2025.11.11 SOPHOS LTD
  • US12468848B2 patent drawing
  • US12468848B2 patent drawing
  • US12468848B2 patent drawing

AI summary

An endpoint in an enterprise network is instrumented with sensors to detect security-related events occurring on the endpoint. Event data from these sensors is augmented with contextual information about, e.g., a source of each event in order to facilitate improved correlation, analysis, and visualization at a threat management facility for the enterprise network.