  Collaborative predictive blacklisting (CPB) allows to forecast future attack
sources based on logs and alerts contributed by multiple organizations.
Unfortunately, however, research on CPB has only focused on increasing the
number of predicted attacks but has not considered the impact on false
positives and false negatives. Moreover, sharing alerts is often hindered by
confidentiality, trust, and liability issues, which motivates the need for
privacy-preserving approaches to the problem. In this paper, we present a
measurement study of state-of-the-art CPB techniques, aiming to shed light on
the actual impact of collaboration. To this end, we reproduce and measure two
systems: a non privacy-friendly one that uses a trusted coordinating party with
access to all alerts (Soldo et al., 2010) and a peer-to-peer one using
privacy-preserving data sharing (Freudiger et al., 2015). We show that, while
collaboration boosts the number of predicted attacks, it also yields high false
positives, ultimately leading to poor accuracy. This motivates us to present a
hybrid approach, using a semi-trusted central entity, aiming to increase
utility from collaboration while, at the same time, limiting information
disclosure and false positives. This leads to a better trade-off of true and
false positive rates, while at the same time addressing privacy concerns.
