The Needle is a Thread: Finding Planted Paths in Noisy Process Trees
Social and Information Networks
2026-02-05 v1 Cryptography and Security
Data Structures and Algorithms
Abstract
Motivated by applications in cybersecurity such as finding meaningful sequences of malware-related events buried inside large amounts of computer log data, we introduce the "planted path" problem and propose an algorithm to find fuzzy matchings between two trees. This algorithm can be used as a "building block" for more complicated workflows. We demonstrate usefulness of a few of such workflows in mining synthetically generated data as well as real-world ACME cybersecurity datasets.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2602.04694,
title = {The Needle is a Thread: Finding Planted Paths in Noisy Process Trees},
author = {Maya Le and Paweł Prałat and Aaron Smith and François Théberge},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.04694},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
15 pages, 9 figures