An Investigation of Insider Threat Mitigation Based on EEG Signal Classification

This study proposes a scheme to identify insider threats in nuclear facilities through the detection of malicious intentions of potential insiders using subject-wise classification. Based on electroencephalography (EEG) signals, a classification model was developed to identify whether a subject has a malicious intention under scenarios of being forced to become an insider threat. The model also distinguishes insider threat scenarios from everyday conflict scenarios. To support model development, 21-channel EEG signals were measured on 25 healthy subjects, and sets of features were extracted from the time, time&ndash
frequency, frequency and nonlinear domains. To select the best use of the available features, automatic selection was performed by random-forest-based algorithms. The k-nearest neighbor, support vector machine with radial kernel, na&iuml
ve Bayes, and multilayer perceptron algorithms were applied for the classification. By using EEG signals obtained while contemplating becoming an insider threat, the subject-wise model identified malicious intentions with 78.57% accuracy. The model also distinguished insider threat scenarios from everyday conflict scenarios with 93.47% accuracy. These findings could be utilized to support the development of insider threat mitigation systems along with existing trustworthiness assessments in the nuclear industry.