Biblio

A rapid rise in cyber-attacks on Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) has been observed in the last decade. It becomes even more concerning that several of these attacks were on critical infrastructures that indeed succeeded and resulted into significant physical and financial damages. Experimental testbeds capable of providing flexible, scalable and interoperable platform for executing various cybersecurity experiments is highly in need by all stakeholders. A container-based SCADA testbed is presented in this work as a potential platform for executing cybersecurity experiments. Through this testbed, a network traffic containing ARP spoofing is generated that represents a Man in the middle (MITM) attack. While doing so, scanning of different systems within the network is performed which represents a reconnaissance attack. The network traffic generated by both ARP spoofing and network scanning are captured and further used for preparing a dataset. The dataset is utilized for training a network classification model through a machine learning algorithm. Performance of the trained model is evaluated through a series of tests where promising results are obtained.

With the advent of networking technologies and increasing network attacks, Intrusion Detection systems are apparently needed to stop attacks and malicious activities. Various frameworks and techniques have been developed to solve the problem of intrusion detection, still there is need for new frameworks as per the challenging scenario of enormous scale in data size and nature of attacks. Current IDS systems pose challenges on the throughput to work with high speed networks. In this paper we address the issue of high computational overhead of anomaly based IDS and propose the solution using discretization as a data preprocessing step which can drastically reduce the computation overhead. We propose method to provide near real time detection of attacks using only basic flow level features that can easily be extracted from network packets.

In recent years, there has been a significant increase in network intrusion attacks which raises a great concern from the privacy and security aspects. Due to the advancement of the technology, cyber-security attacks are becoming very complex such that the current detection systems are not sufficient enough to address this issue. Therefore, an implementation of an intelligent and effective network intrusion detection system would be crucial to solve this problem. In this paper, we use deep learning techniques, namely, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) to design an intelligent detection system which is able to detect different network intrusions. Additionally, we evaluate the performance of the proposed solution using different evaluation matrices and we present a comparison between the results of our proposed solution to find the best model for the network intrusion detection system.

With the rapid development of Internet, the issue of cyber security has increasingly gained more attention. An intrusion Detection System (IDS) is an effective technique to defend cyber-attacks and reduce security losses. However, the challenge of IDS lies in the diversity of cyber-attackers and the frequently-changing data requiring a flexible and efficient solution. To address this problem, machine learning approaches are being applied in the IDS field. In this paper, we propose an efficient scalable neural-network-based hybrid IDS framework with the combination of Host-level IDS (HIDS) and Network-level IDS (NIDS). We applied the autoencoders (AE) to NIDS and designed HIDS using word embedding and convolutional neural network. To evaluate the IDS, many experiments are performed on the public datasets NSL-KDD and ADFA. It can detect many attacks and reduce the security risk with high efficiency and excellent scalability.

The widespread application of 5G will make intrusion detection of large-scale network traffic a mere need. However, traditional intrusion detection cannot meet the requirements by manually extracting features, and the existing AI methods are also relatively inefficient. Therefore, when performing intrusion detection tasks, they have significant disadvantages of high false alarm rates and low recognition performance. For this challenge, this paper proposes a novel hybrid network, RULA-IDS, which can perform intrusion detection tasks by great amount statistical data from the network monitoring system. RULA-IDS consists of the fully connected layer, the feature extraction layer, the global attention mechanism layer and the SVM classification layer. In the feature extraction layer, the residual U-Net and LSTM are used to extract the spatial and temporal features of the network traffic attributes. It is worth noting that we modified the structure of U-Net to suit the intrusion detection task. The global attention mechanism layer is then used to selectively retain important information from a large number of features and focus on those. Finally, the SVM is used as a classifier to output results. The experimental results show that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art intrusion detection methods, and the accuracies of training and testing are improved to 97.01% and 98.19%, respectively, and presents stronger robustness during training and testing.

This research provides security and safety extensions to a blockchain based solution whose target is e-health. The Advanced Blockchain platform is extended with intelligent monitoring for security and machine learning for detecting patient treatment medication safety issues. For the reasons of stringent HIPAA, HITECH, EU-GDPR and other regional regulations dictating security, safety and privacy requirements, the e-Health blockchains have to cover mandatory disclosure of violations or enforcements of policies during transaction flows involving healthcare. Our service solution further provides the benefits of resolving the abnormal flows of a medical treatment process, providing accountability of the service providers, enabling a trust health information environment for institutions to handle medication safely, giving patients a better safety guarantee, and enabling the authorities to supervise the security and safety of e-Health blockchains. The capabilities can be generalized to support a uniform smart solution across industry in a variety of blockchain applications.

K-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN) search is one of the most commonly used approaches for similarity search. It finds extensive applications in machine learning and data mining. This era of big data warrants efficiently scaling k-NN search algorithms for billion-scale datasets with high dimensionality. In this paper, we propose a solution towards this end where we use vantage point trees for partitioning the dataset across multiple processes and exploit an existing graph-based sequential approximate k-NN search algorithm called HNSW (Hierarchical Navigable Small World) for searching locally within a process. Our hybrid MPI-OpenMP solution employs techniques including exploiting MPI one-sided communication for reducing communication times and partition replication for better load balancing across processes. We demonstrate computation of k-NN for 10,000 queries in the order of seconds using our approach on 8000 cores on a dataset with billion points in an 128-dimensional space. We also show 10X speedup over a completely k-d tree-based solution for the same dataset, thus demonstrating better suitability of our solution for high dimensional datasets. Our solution shows almost linear strong scaling.

The size and complexity of the software ecosystem is a major challenge for vendors, asset owners and cybersecurity professionals who need to understand the security posture of these systems. Annotated and Translated Disassembled Code is a graph based datastore designed to organize firmware and software analysis data across builds, packages and systems, providing a highly scalable platform enabling automated binary software analysis tasks including corpora construction and storage for machine learning. This paper describes an approach for the identification of ubiquitous third-party libraries in firmware and software using Annotated and Translated Disassembled Code and supervised machine learning. Annotated and Translated Disassembled Code provide matched libraries, function names and addresses of previously unidentified code in software as it is being automatically analyzed. This data can be ingested by other software analysis tools to improve accuracy and save time. Defenders can add the identified libraries to their vulnerability searches and add effective detection and mitigation into their operating environment.

Online social media plays an important role during real world events such as natural calamities, elections, social movements etc. Since the social media usage has increased, fake news has grown. The social media is often used by modifying true news or creating fake news to spread misinformation. The creation and distribution of fake news poses major threats in several respects from a national security point of view. Hence Fake news identification becomes an essential goal for enhancing the trustworthiness of the information shared on online social network. Over the period of time many researcher has used different methods, algorithms, tools and techniques to identify fake news content from online social networks. The aim of this paper is to review and examine these methodologies, different tools, browser extensions and analyze the degree of output in question. In addition, this paper discuss the general approach of fake news detection as well as taxonomy of feature extraction which plays an important role to achieve maximum accuracy with the help of different Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing algorithms.

Artificial Intelligence systems have enabled significant benefits for users and society, but whilst the data for their feeding are always increasing, a side to privacy and security leaks is offered. The severe vulnerabilities to the right to privacy obliged governments to enact specific regulations to ensure privacy preservation in any kind of transaction involving sensitive information. In the case of digital and/or physical documents comprising sensitive information, the right to privacy can be preserved by data obfuscation procedures. The capability of recognizing sensitive information for obfuscation is typically entrusted to the experience of human experts, who are over-whelmed by the ever increasing amount of documents to process. Artificial intelligence could proficiently mitigate the effort of the human officers and speed up processes. Anyway, until enough knowledge won't be available in a machine readable format, automatic and effectively working systems can't be developed. In this work we propose a methodology for transferring and leveraging general knowledge across specific-domain tasks. We built, from scratch, specific-domain knowledge data sets, for training artificial intelligence models supporting human experts in privacy preserving tasks. We exploited a mixture of natural language processing techniques applied to unlabeled domain-specific documents corpora for automatically obtain labeled documents, where sensitive information are recognized and tagged. We performed preliminary tests just over 10.000 documents from the healthcare and justice domains. Human experts supported us during the validation. Results we obtained, estimated in terms of precision, recall and F1-score metrics across these two domains, were promising and encouraged us to further investigations.

Social engineering attacks are well known attacks in the cyberspace and relatively easy to try and implement because no technical knowledge is required. In various online environments such as business domains where customers talk through a chat service with employees or in social networks potential hackers can try to manipulate other people by employing social attacks against them to gain information that will benefit them in future attacks. Thus, we have used a number of natural language processing steps and a machine learning algorithm to identify potential attacks. The proposed method has been tested on a semi-synthetic dataset and it is shown to be both practical and effective.

DDoS attacks impose serious threats to many large or small organizations; therefore DDoS attacks have to be detected as soon as possible. In this study, a methodology to detect DDoS attacks is proposed and implemented on online systems. In the scope of the proposed methodology, Multi Layer Perceptron (MLP), Random Forest (RF), K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), C-Support Vector Machine (SVC) machine learning methods are used with scaling and feature reduction preprocessing methods and then effects of preprocesses on detection accuracy rates of HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) flood, TCP SYN (Transport Control Protocol Synchronize) flood, UDP (User Datagram Protocol) flood and ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol) flood DDoS attacks are analyzed. Obtained results showed that DDoS attacks can be detected with high accuracy of 99.2%.

In the area of cloud security, detection of DDoS attack is a challenging task such that legitimate users use the cloud resources properly. So in this paper, detection and classification of the attacking packets and normal packets are done by using various machine learning classifiers. We have selected the most relevant features from NSL KDD dataset using five (Information gain, gain ratio, chi-squared, ReliefF, and symmetrical uncertainty) commonly used feature selection methods. Now from the entire selected feature set, the most important features are selected by applying our hybrid feature selection method. Since all the anomalous instances of the dataset do not belong to DDoS category so we have separated only the DDoS packets from the dataset using the selected features. Finally, the dataset has been prepared and named as KDD DDoS dataset by considering the selected DDoS packets and normal packets. This KDD DDoS dataset has been discretized using discretize tool in weka for getting better performance. Finally, this discretize dataset has been applied on some commonly used (Naive Bayes, Bayes Net, Decision Table, J48 and Random Forest) classifiers for determining the detection rate of the classifiers. 10 fold cross validation has been used here for measuring the robustness of the system. To measure the efficiency of our hybrid feature selection method, we have also applied the same set of classifiers on the NSL KDD dataset, where it gives the best anomaly detection rate of 99.72% and average detection rate 98.47% similarly, we have applied the same set of classifiers on NSL DDoS dataset and obtain the average DDoS detection of 99.01% and the best DDoS detection rate of 99.86%. In order to compare the performance of our proposed hybrid method, we have also applied the existing feature selection methods and measured the detection rate using the same set of classifiers. Finally, we have seen that our hybrid approach for detecting the DDoS attack gives the best detection rate compared to some existing methods.

Tensors, as the multidimensional generalization of matrices, are naturally suited for representing and processing high-dimensional data. To date, tensors have been widely adopted in various data-intensive applications, such as machine learning and big data analysis. However, due to the inherent large-size characteristics of tensors, tensor algorithms, as the approaches that synthesize, transform or decompose tensors, are very computation and storage expensive, thereby hindering the potential further adoptions of tensors in many application scenarios, especially on the resource-constrained hardware platforms. In this paper, we propose a reduced-complexity SVD (Singular Vector Decomposition) scheme, which serves as the key operation in Tucker decomposition. By using iterative self-multiplication, the proposed scheme can significantly reduce the storage and computational costs of SVD, thereby reducing the complexity of the overall process. Then, corresponding hardware architecture is developed with 28nm CMOS technology. Our synthesized design can achieve 102GOPS with 1.09 mm2 area and 37.6 mW power consumption, and thereby providing a promising solution for accelerating Tucker decomposition.

Considering the amount of time we spend on the internet, web pages have evolved over a period of time with rapid progression and momentum. With such advancement, we find ourselves fronting a few hostile ideologies, breaching the security levels of webpages as such. The most hazardous of them all is XSS, known as Cross-Site Scripting, is one of the attacks which frequently occur in website-based applications. Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attacks happen when malicious data enters a web application through an untrusted source. The spam attacks happen in the form of Wall posts, News feed, Message spam and mostly when a user is open to download content of webpages. This paper investigates the use of machine learning to build classifiers to allow the detection of XSS. Establishing our approach, we target the detection modus operandi of XSS attack via two features: URLs and JavaScript. To predict the level of XSS threat, we will be using four machine learning algorithms (SVM, KNN, Random forest and Logistic Regression). Proposing these classified algorithms, webpages will be branded as malicious or benign. After assessing and calculating the dataset features, we concluded that the Random Forest Classifier performed most accurately with the lowest False Positive Rate of 0.34. This precision will ensure a method much efficient to evaluate threatening XSS for the smooth functioning of the system.

This article discusses the problem of detecting cross-site scripting (XSS) using machine learning methods. XSS is an attack in which malicious code is embedded on a page to interact with an attacker’s web server. The XSS attack ranks third in the ranking of key web application risks according to Open Source Foundation for Application Security (OWASP). This attack has not been studied for a long time. It was considered harmless. However, this is fallacious: the page or HTTP Cookie may contain very vulnerable data, such as payment document numbers or the administrator session token. Machine learning is a tool that can be used to detect XSS attacks. This article describes an experiment. As a result the model for detecting XSS attacks was created. Following machine learning algorithms are considered: the support vector method, the decision tree, the Naive Bayes classifier, and Logistic Regression. The accuracy of the presented methods is made a comparison.

Cryptojacking is currently being exploited by cyber-criminals. This form of malware runs in the computers of victims without their consent. It often infects browsers and does CPU-intensive computations to mine cryptocurrencies on behalf of the cyber-criminal, which takes the profits without paying for the resources consumed. Such attacks degrade computer performance and potentially reduce the hardware lifetime. We introduce a new cryptojacking detection mechanism based on monitoring the CPU usage of the visited web pages. This may look like an unreliable way to detect mining malware since many web sites are heavy computationally and that malware often throttles CPU usage. However, by combining a set of CPU monitoring features and using machine learning, we manage to obtain metrics like precision and recall close to 1.

Malware refers to any software accessing or being installed in a system without the authorisation of administrators. Various malware has been widely used for cyber-criminals to accomplish their evil intentions and goals. To combat the increasing amount and reduce the threat of malicious programs, a novel deep learning framework, which uses NLP techniques for reference, combines CNN and LSTM neurones to capture the locally spatial correlations and learn from sequential longterm dependency is proposed. Hence, high-level abstractions and representations are automatically extracted for the malware classification task. The classification accuracy improves from 0.81 (best one by Random Forest) to approximately 1.0.

Internet is the most widely used technology in the current era of information technology and it is embedded in daily life activities. Due to its extensive use in everyday life, it has many applications such as social media (Face book, WhatsApp, messenger etc.,) and other online applications such as online businesses, e-counseling, advertisement on websites, e-banking, e-hunting websites, e-doctor appointment and e-doctor opinion. The above mentioned applications of internet technology makes things very easy and accessible for human being in limited time, however, this technology is vulnerable to various security threats. A vital and severe threat associated with this technology or a particular application is “Phishing attack” which is used by attacker to usurp the network security. Phishing attacks includes fake E-mails, fake websites, fake applications which are used to steal their credentials or usurp their security. In this paper, a detailed overview of various phishing attacks, specifically their background knowledge, and solutions proposed in literature to address these issues using various techniques such as anti-phishing, honey pots and firewalls etc. Moreover, installation of intrusion detection systems (IDS) and intrusion detection and prevention system (IPS) in the networks to allow the authentic traffic in an operational network. In this work, we have conducted end use awareness campaign to educate and train the employs in order to minimize the occurrence probability of these attacks. The result analysis observed for this survey was quite excellent by means of its effectiveness to address the aforementioned issues.

This paper describes a system that comprises of control, safety and security subsystem for industries and homes. The entire system is based on the Bolt IoT platform. Using this system, the user can control the devices such as LEDs, speed of the fan or DC motor, monitor the temperature of the premises with an alert sub-system for critical temperatures through SMS and call, monitor the presence of anyone inside the premises with an alert sub-system about any intrusion through SMS and call. If the system is used specifically in any industry then instead of monitoring the temperature any other physical quantity, which is critical for that industry, can be monitored using suitable sensors. In addition, the cloud connectivity is provided to the system using the Bolt IoT module and temperature data is sent to the cloud where using machine-learning algorithm the future temperature is predicted to avoid any accidents in the future.

For real-time applications of arbitrary style transformation, there is a trade-off between the quality of results and the running time of existing algorithms. Hence, it is required to maintain the equilibrium of the quality of generated artwork with the speed of execution. It's complicated for the present arbitrary style-transformation procedures to preserve the structure of content-image while blending with the design and pattern of style-image. This paper presents the implementation of a network using SANET models for generating impressive artworks. It is flexible in the fusion of new style characteristics while sustaining the semantic-structure of the content-image. The identity-loss function helps to minimize the overall loss and conserves the spatial-arrangement of content. The results demonstrate that this method is practically efficient, and therefore it can be employed for real-time fusion and transformation using arbitrary styles.

Style transfer between Chinese fonts is challenging due to both the complexity of Chinese characters and the significant difference between fonts. Existing algorithms for this task typically learn a mapping between the reference and target fonts for each character. Subsequently, this mapping is used to generate the characters that do not exist in the target font. However, the characters available for training are unlikely to cover all fine-grained parts of the missing characters, leading to the overfitting problem. As a result, the generated characters of the target font may suffer problems of incomplete or even radicals and dirty dots. To address this problem, this paper presents a multi-task adversarial learning approach, termed MTfontGAN, to generate more vivid Chinese characters. MTfontGAN learns to transfer a reference font to multiple target ones simultaneously. An alignment is imposed on the encoders of different tasks to make them focus on the important parts of the characters in general style transfer. Such cross-task interactions at the feature level effectively improve the generalization capability of MTfontGAN. The performance of MTfontGAN is evaluated on three Chinese font datasets. Experimental results show that MTfontGAN outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms in a single-task setting. More importantly, increasing the number of tasks leads to better performance in all of them.

The prevalence of photo processing apps suggests the demands of picture editing. As an implementation of the convolutional neural network, style transfer has been deep investigated and there are supported materials to realize it on PC platform. However, few approaches are mentioned to deploy a style transfer model on the mobile and meet the requirements of mobile users. The traditional style transfer model takes hours to proceed, therefore, based on a Perceptual Losses algorithm [1], we created a feedforward neural network for each style and the proceeding time was reduced to a few seconds. The training data were generated from a pre-trained convolutional neural network model, VGG-19. The algorithm took thousandth time and generated similar output as the original. Furthermore, we optimized the model and deployed the model with TensorFlow Mobile library. We froze the model and adopted a bitmap to scale the inputs to 720×720 and reverted back to the original resolution. The reverting process may create some blur but it can be regarded as a feature of art. The generated images have reliable quality and the waiting time is independent of the content and pattern of input images. The main factor that influences the proceeding time is the input resolution. The average waiting time of our model on the mobile phone, HUAWEI P20 Pro, is less than 2 seconds for 720p images and around 2.8 seconds for 1080p images, which are ten times slower than that on the PC GPU, Tesla T40. The performance difference depends on the architecture of the model.

Advances in deep neural networks (DNNs) have shown tremendous promise in the medical domain. However, the deep learning tools that are helping the domain, can also be used against it. Given the prevalence of fraud in the healthcare domain, it is important to consider the adversarial use of DNNs in manipulating sensitive data that is crucial to patient healthcare. In this work, we present the design and implementation of a DNN-based image translation attack on biomedical imagery. More specifically, we propose Jekyll, a neural style transfer framework that takes as input a biomedical image of a patient and translates it to a new image that indicates an attacker-chosen disease condition. The potential for fraudulent claims based on such generated `fake' medical images is significant, and we demonstrate successful attacks on both X-rays and retinal fundus image modalities. We show that these attacks manage to mislead both medical professionals and algorithmic detection schemes. Lastly, we also investigate defensive measures based on machine learning to detect images generated by Jekyll.

The linear regression is a machine learning algorithm used for prediction. But if the input data is in plaintext form then there is a high probability that the sensitive information will get leaked. To overcome this, here we are proposing a method where the input data is encrypted using Homomorphic encryption. The machine learning algorithm can be used on this encrypted data for prediction while maintaining the privacy and secrecy of the sensitive data. The output from this model will be an encrypted result. This encrypted result will be decrypted using a Homomorphic decryption technique to get the plain text. To determine the accuracy of our result, we will compare it with the result obtained after applying the linear regression algorithm on the plain text.