Biblio

Phasor measurement units (PMUs) are used in power grids across North America to measure the amplitude, phase, and frequency of an alternating voltage or current. PMU's use the IEEE C37.118 protocol to send telemetry to phasor data collectors (PDC) and human machine interface (HMI) workstations in a control center. However, the C37.118 protocol utilizes the internet protocol stack without any authentication mechanism. This means that the protocol is vulnerable to false data injection (FDI) and false command injection (FCI). In order to study different scenarios in which C37.118 protocol's integrity and confidentiality can be compromised, we created a testbed that emulates a C37.118 communication network. In this testbed we conduct FCI and FDI attacks on real-time C37.118 data packets using a packet manipulation tool called Scapy. Using this platform, we generated C37.118 FCI and FDI datasets which are processed by multi-label machine learning classifier algorithms, such as Decision Tree (DT), k-Nearest Neighbor (kNN), and Naive Bayes (NB), to find out how effective machine learning can be at detecting such attacks. Our results show that the DT classifier had the best precision and recall rate.

Power grids are the most extensive man-made systems that are difficult to control and monitor. With the development of conventional power grids and moving toward smart grids, power systems have undergone vast changes since they use the Internet to transmit information and control commands to different parts of the power system. Due to the use of the Internet as a basic infrastructure for smart grids, attackers can sabotage the communication networks and alter the measurements. Due to the complexity of the smart grids, it is difficult for the network operator to detect such cyber-attacks. The attackers can implement the attack in a manner that conventional Bad Data detection (BDD) systems cannot detect since it may not violate the physical laws of the power system. This paper uses the cross wavelet transform (XWT) to detect stealth false data injections attacks (FDIAs) against state estimation (SE) systems. XWT can capture the coherency between measurements of adjacent buses and represent it in time and frequency space. Then, we train a machine learning classification algorithm to distinguish attacked measurements from normal measurements by applying a feature extraction technique.

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are machine learning methods that are used in many important and novel applications. For example, in imaging science, GANs are effectively utilized in generating image datasets, photographs of human faces, image and video captioning, image-to-image translation, text-to-image translation, video prediction, and 3D object generation to name a few. In this paper, we discuss how GANs can be used to create an artificial world. More specifically, we discuss how GANs help to describe an image utilizing image/video captioning methods and how to translate the image to a new image using image-to-image translation frameworks in a theme we desire. We articulate how GANs impact creating a customized world.

Numerical simulation of fluid flow is a significant research concern during the design process of a machine component that experiences fluid-structure interaction (FSI). State-of-the-art in traditional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has made CFD reach a relative perfection level during the last couple of decades. However, the accuracy of CFD is highly dependent on mesh size; therefore, the computational cost depends on resolving the minor feature. The computational complexity grows even further when there are multiple physics and scales involved making the approach time-consuming. In contrast, machine learning (ML) has shown a highly encouraging capacity to forecast solutions for partial differential equations. A trained neural network has offered to make accurate approximations instantaneously compared with conventional simulation procedures. This study presents transient fluid flow prediction past a fully immersed body as an integral part of the ML-CFD project. MLCFD is a hybrid approach that involves initialising the CFD simulation domain with a solution forecasted by an ML model to achieve fast convergence in traditional CDF. Initial results are highly encouraging, and the entire time-based series of fluid patterns past the immersed structure is forecasted using a deep learning algorithm. Prepared results show a strong agreement compared with fluid flow simulation performed utilising CFD.

The paper describes a methodology for assessing non-functional requirements, such as trust characteristics for applications running on computationally constrained devices in the Internet of Things. The methodology is demonstrated through an example of a microcontroller-based temperature monitoring system. The concepts of trust and trustworthiness for software and devices of the Internet of Things are complex characteristics for describing the correct and secure operation of such systems and include aspects of operational and information security, reliability, resilience and privacy. Machine learning models, which are increasingly often used for such tasks in recent years, are resource-consuming software implementations. The paper proposes to use a logic circuit model to implement the above algorithms as an additional module for computationally constrained devices for checking the trustworthiness of applications running on them. Such a module could be implemented as a hardware, for example, as an FPGA in order to achieve more effectiveness.

Large open-source systems generate and operate on a plethora of sensitive enterprise data. Thus, security threats or vulnerabilities must not be present in open-source systems and must be resolved as early as possible in the development phases to avoid catastrophic consequences. One way to recognize security vulnerabilities is to predict them while developers write code to minimize costs and resources. This study examines the effectiveness of machine learning algorithms to predict potential security vulnerabilities by analyzing the source code of a system. We obtained the security vulnerabilities dataset from Apache Tomcat security reports for version 4.x to 10.x. We also collected the source code of Apache Tomcat 4.x to 10.x to compute 43 object-oriented metrics. We assessed four traditional supervised learning algorithms, i.e., Naive Bayes (NB), Decision Tree (DT), K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), and Logistic Regression (LR), to understand their efficacy in predicting security vulnerabilities. We obtained the highest accuracy of 80.6% using the KNN. Thus, the KNN classifier was demonstrated to be the most effective of all the models we built. The DT classifier also performed well but under-performed when it came to multi-class classification.

With the rapid increase of practical problem complexity and code scale, the threat of software security is increasingly serious. Consequently, it is crucial to pay attention to the analysis of software source code vulnerability in the development stage and take efficient measures to detect the vulnerability as soon as possible. Machine learning techniques have made remarkable achievements in various fields. However, the application of machine learning in the domain of vulnerability static analysis is still in its infancy and the characteristics and performance of diverse methods are quite different. In this survey, we focus on a source code-oriented static vulnerability analysis method using machine learning techniques. We review the studies on source code vulnerability analysis based on machine learning in the past decade. We systematically summarize the development trends and different technical characteristics in this field from the perspectives of the intermediate representation of source code and vulnerability prediction model and put forward several feasible research directions in the future according to the limitations of the current approaches.

The ever increasing need to ensure that code is reliably, efficiently and safely constructed has fueled the evolution of popular static binary code analysis tools. In identifying potential coding flaws in binaries, tools such as IDA Pro are used to disassemble the binaries into an opcode/assembly language format in support of manual static code analysis. Because of the highly manual and resource intensive nature involved with analyzing large binaries, the probability of overlooking potential coding irregularities and inefficiencies is quite high. In this paper, a light-weight, unsupervised data flow methodology is described which uses highly-correlated data flow graph (CDFGs) to identify coding irregularities such that analysis time and required computing resources are minimized. Such analysis accuracy and efficiency gains are achieved by using a combination of graph analysis and unsupervised machine learning techniques which allows an analyst to focus on the most statistically significant flow patterns while performing binary static code analysis.

This paper proposes a logic-based machine learning approach called Acuity which is designed to facilitate user-guided elucidation of novel phenomena from evidence sparsely distributed across large volumes of linked relational data. The work builds on systems from the field of Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) by introducing a suite of new techniques for interacting with domain experts and data sources in a way that allows complex logical reasoning to be strategically exploited on large real-world databases through intuitive hypothesis-shaping and data-caching functionality. We propose two methods for rebutting or shaping candidate hypotheses and two methods for querying or importing relevant data from multiple sources. The benefits of Acuity are illustrated in a proof-of-principle case study involving a retrospective analysis of the CryptoWall ransomware attack using data from a cyber security testbed comprising a small business network and an infected laptop.

Relational database management systems not only support larger-than-memory data processing and very advanced query optimization, but also offer the benefits of data security, privacy, and consistency. When machine learning on large data sets is processed directly on an existing SQL database server, the data does not need to be exported and transferred to a separate big data processing platform. To achieve this, we implement a linear regression algorithm using SQL code generation such that the computation can be performed server-side and directly in the RDBMs. Our method and its implementation, programmed in Python, solves linear regression (LR) using the ordinary least squares (OLS) method directly in the RDBMS using SQL code generation, leaving most of the processing in the database. Only the matrix of the system of equations, whose size is equal to the number of variables squared, is transferred from the SQL server to the Python client to be solved for OLS regression. For evaluation purposes, our LR implementation was tested with artificially generated datasets and compared to an existing Python library (Scikit Learn). We found that our implementation consistently solves OLS regression faster than Scikit Learn for datasets with more than 10,000 input rows, and if the number of columns is less than 64. Moreover, under the same test conditions where the computation is larger than memory, our implementation showed a fast result, while Scikit returned an out-of-memory error. We conclude that SQL is a promising tool for in-database processing of large-volume, low-dimensional data sets with a particular class of machine learning algorithms, namely those that can be efficiently solved with map-reduce queries such as OLS regression.

In Social Aware Network (SAN) model, the elementary actions focus on investigating the attributes and behaviors of the customer. This analysis of customer attributes facilitate in the design of highly active and improved protocols. In specific, the recommender systems are highly vulnerable to the shilling attack. The recommender system provides the solution to solve the issues like information overload. Collaborative filtering based recommender systems are susceptible to shilling attack known as profile injection attacks. In the shilling attack, the malicious users bias the output of the system's recommendations by adding the fake profiles. The attacker exploits the customer reviews, customer ratings and fake data for the processing of recommendation level. It is essential to detect the shilling attack in the network for sustaining the reliability and fairness of the recommender systems. This article reviews the most prominent issues and challenges of shilling attack. This paper presents the literature survey which is contributed in focusing of shilling attack and also describes the merits and demerits with its evaluation metrics like attack detection accuracy, precision and recall along with different datasets used for identifying the shilling attack in SAN network.

In the era of rapid technological growth, malicious traffic has drawn increased attention. Most well-known offensive security assessment todays are heavily focused on pre-compromise. The amount of anomalous data in today's context is massive. Analyzing the data using primitive methods would be highly challenging. Solution to it is: If we can detect adversary behaviors in the early stage of compromise, one can prevent and safeguard themselves from various attacks including ransomwares and Zero-day attacks. Integration of new technologies Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning with manual Anomaly Detection can provide automated machine-based detection which in return can provide the fast, error free, simplify & scalable Threat Detection & Response System. Endpoint Detection & Response (EDR) tools provide a unified view of complex intrusions using known adversarial behaviors to identify intrusion events. We have used the EMBER dataset, which is a labelled benchmark dataset. It is used to train machine learning models to detect malicious portable executable files. This dataset consists of features derived from 1.1 million binary files: 900,000 training samples among which 300,000 were malicious, 300,000 were benevolent, 300,000 un-labelled, and 200,000 evaluation samples among which 100K were malicious, 100K were benign. We have also included open-source code for extracting features from additional binaries, enabling the addition of additional sample features to the dataset.

A new method for the detection of ransomware in an infected host is described and evaluated. The method utilizes data streams from on-board sensors to fingerprint the initiation of a ransomware infection. These sensor streams, which are common in modern computing systems, are used as a side channel for understanding the state of the system. It is shown that ransomware detection can be achieved in a rapid manner and that the use of slight, yet distinguishable changes in the physical state of a system as derived from a machine learning predictive model is an effective technique. A feature vector, consisting of various sensor outputs, is coupled with a detection criteria to predict the binary state of ransomware present versus normal operation. An advantage of this approach is that previously unknown or zero-day version s of ransomware are vulnerable to this detection method since no apriori knowledge of the malware characteristics are required. Experiments are carried out with a variety of different system loads and with different encryption methods used during a ransomware attack. Two test systems were utilized with one having a relatively low amount of available sensor data and the other having a relatively high amount of available sensor data. The average time for attack detection in the "sensor-rich" system was 7.79 seconds with an average Matthews correlation coefficient of 0.8905 for binary system state predictions regardless of encryption method and system load. The model flagged all attacks tested.

Threats, posed by ransomware, are rapidly increasing, and its cost on both national and global scales is becoming significantly high as evidenced by the recent events. Ransomware carries out an irreversible process, where it encrypts victims' digital assets to seek financial compensations. Adversaries utilize different means to gain initial access to the target machines, such as phishing emails, vulnerable public-facing software, Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), brute-force attacks, and stolen accounts. To combat these threats of ransomware, this paper aims to help researchers gain a better understanding of ransomware application profiles through static analysis, where we identify a list of suspicious indicators and similarities among 727 active ran-somware samples. We start with generating portable executable (PE) metadata for all the studied samples. With our domain knowledge and exploratory data analysis tasks, we introduce some of the suspicious indicators of the structure of ransomware files. We reduce the dimensionality of the generated dataset by using the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) technique and discover clusters by applying the KMeans algorithm. This motivates us to utilize the one-class classification algorithms on the generated dataset. As a result, the algorithms learn the common data boundary in the structure of our studied ransomware samples, and thereby, we achieve the data-driven similarities. We use the findings to evaluate the trained classifiers with the test samples and observe that the Local Outlier Factor (LoF) performs better on all the selected feature spaces compared to the One-Class SVM and the Isolation Forest algorithms.

The number of prominent ransomware attacks has increased recently. In this research, we detect ransomware by analyzing network traffic by using machine learning algorithms and comparing their detection performances. We have developed multi-class classification models to detect families of ransomware by using the selected network traffic features, which focus on the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). Our experiment showed that decision trees performed best for classifying ransomware families with 99.83% accuracy, which is slightly better than the random forest algorithm with 99.61% accuracy. The experimental result without feature selection classified six ransomware families with high accuracy. On the other hand, classifiers with feature selection gave nearly the same result as those without feature selection. However, using feature selection gives the advantage of lower memory usage and reduced processing time, thereby increasing speed. We discovered the following ten important features for detecting ransomware: time delta, frame length, IP length, IP destination, IP source, TCP length, TCP sequence, TCP next sequence, TCP header length, and TCP initial round trip.

Ransomware is a major malware attack experienced by large corporations and healthcare services. Ransomware employs the idea of cryptovirology, which uses cryptography to design malware. The goal of ransomware is to extort ransom by threatening the victim with the destruction of their data. Ransomware typically involves a 3-step process: analyzing the victim’s network traffic, identifying a vulnerability, and then exploiting it. Thus, the detection of ransomware has become an important undertaking that involves various sophisticated solutions for improving security. To further enhance ransomware detection capabilities, this paper focuses on an Application Programming Interface (API)-based ransomware detection approach in combination with machine learning (ML) techniques. The focus of this research is (i) understanding the life cycle of ransomware on the Windows platform, (ii) dynamic analysis of ransomware samples to extract various features of malicious code patterns, and (iii) developing and validating machine learning-based ransomware detection models on different ransomware and benign samples. Data were collected from publicly available repositories and subjected to sandbox analysis for sampling. The sampled datasets were applied to build machine learning models. The grid search hyperparameter optimization algorithm was employed to obtain the best fit model; the results were cross-validated with the testing datasets. This analysis yielded a high ransomware detection accuracy of 99.18% for Windows-based platforms and shows the potential for achieving high-accuracy ransomware detection capabilities when using a combination of API calls and an ML model. This approach can be further utilized with existing multilayer security solutions to protect critical data from ransomware attacks.

Multi-access edge computing (MEC) equipped with artificial intelligence is a promising technology in B5G wireless systems. Due to outsourcing and other transactions, some primitive security modules need to be introduced. In this paper, we design a primitive cipher based on double discrete exponentiation and double discrete logarithm. The machine learning methodology is incorporated in the development. Several interesting results are obtained. It reveals that the number of key-rounds is critically important.

Modern smart grid systems are heavily dependent on Information and Communication Technology, and this dependency makes them prone to cyber-attacks. The occurrence of a cyber-attack has increased in recent years resulting in substantial damage to power systems. For a reliable and stable operation, cyber protection, control, and detection techniques are becoming essential. Automated detection of cyberattacks with high accuracy is a challenge. To address this, we propose a two-layer hierarchical machine learning model having an accuracy of 95.44 % to improve the detection of cyberattacks. The first layer of the model is used to distinguish between the two modes of operation - normal state or cyberattack. The second layer is used to classify the state into different types of cyberattacks. The layered approach provides an opportunity for the model to focus its training on the targeted task of the layer, resulting in improvement in model accuracy. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed model, we compared its performance against other recent cyber attack detection models proposed in the literature.

In this study, it is aimed to reduce False-Alarm levels and increase the correct detection rate in order to reduce this uncertainty. Within the scope of the study, 13157 SQLi and XSS type malicious and 10000 normal HTTP Requests were used. All HTTP requests were received from the same web server, and it was observed that normal requests and malicious requests were close to each other. In this study, a novel approach is presented via both digitization and expressing the data with words in the data preprocessing stages. LSTM, MLP, CNN, GNB, SVM, KNN, DT, RF algorithms were used for classification and the results were evaluated with accuracy, precision, recall and F1-score metrics. As a contribution of this study, we can clearly express the following inferences. Each payload even if it seems different which has the same impact maybe that we can clearly view after the preprocessing phase. After preprocessing we are calculating euclidean distances which brings and gives us the relativity between expressions. When we put this relativity as an entry data to machine learning and/or deep learning models, perhaps we can understand the benign request or the attack vector difference.

With the developing technology, cyber threats are developing rapidly, and the motivations and targets of cyber attackers are changing. In order to combat these threats, cyber threat information that provides information about the threats and the characteristics of the attackers is needed. In addition, it is of great importance to cooperate with other stakeholders and share experiences so that more information about threat information can be obtained and necessary measures can be taken quickly. In this context, in this study, it is stated that the establishment of a cooperation mechanism in which cyber threat information is shared will contribute to the cyber security capacity of organizations. And using the Zack Information Gap analysis, the deficiency of organizations in sharing threat information were determined and suggestions were presented. In addition, there are cooperation mechanisms in the USA and the EU where cyber threat information is shared, and it has been evaluated that it would be beneficial to establish a similar mechanism in our country. Thus, it is evaluated that advanced or unpredictable cyber threats can be detected, the cyber security capacities of all stakeholders will increase and a safer cyber ecosystem will be created. In addition, it is possible to collect, store, distribute and share information about the analysis of cyber incidents and malware analysis, to improve existing cyber security products or to encourage new product development, by carrying out joint R&D studies among the stakeholders to ensure that domestic and national cyber security products can be developed. It is predicted that new analysis methods can be developed by using technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning.

With the development of artificial intelligence and cryptography, intelligent cryptography will be the trend of encrypted communications in the future. Abadi designed an encrypted communication model based on a generative adversarial network, which can communicate securely when the adversary knows the ciphertext. The communication party and the adversary fight against each other to continuously improve their own capabilities to achieve a state of secure communication. However, this model can only have a better communication effect under the 16 bits communication length, and cannot adapt to the length of modern encrypted communication. Combine the neural network structure in DCGAN to optimize the neural network of the original model, and at the same time increase the batch normalization process, and optimize the loss function in the original model. Experiments show that under the condition of the maximum 2048-bit communication length, the decryption success rate of communication reaches about 0.97, while ensuring that the adversary’s guess error rate is about 0.95, and the training speed is greatly increased to keep it below 5000 steps, ensuring safety and efficiency Communication.

Facial emotion recognition (FER) is useful in many different applications and could offer significant benefit as part of feedback systems to train children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) who struggle to recognize facial expressions and emotions. This project explores the potential of real time FER based on the use of local regions of interest combined with a machine learning approach. Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) was implemented for feature extraction, along with 3 different classifiers, 2 based on k-Nearest Neighbor and 1 using Support Vector Machine (SVM) classification. Model performance was compared using accuracy of randomly selected validation sets after training on random training sets of the Oulu-CASIA database. Image classes were distributed evenly, and accuracies of up to 98.44% were observed with small variation depending on data distributions. The region selection methodology provided a compromise between accuracy and number of extracted features, and validated the hypothesis a focus on smaller informative regions performs just as well as the entire image.

In recent years web applications that are hacked every day estimated to be 30 000, and in most cases, web developers or website owners do not even have enough knowledge about what is happening on their sites. Web hackers can use many attacks to gain entry or compromise legitimate web applications, they can also deceive people by using phishing sites to collect their sensitive and private information. In response to this, the need is raised to take proper measures to understand the risks and be aware of the vulnerabilities that may affect the website and hence the normal business flow. In the scope of this study, mitigations against the most common web application attacks are set, and the web administrator is provided with ways to detect phishing links which is a social engineering attack, the study also demonstrates the generation of web application logs that simplifies the process of analyzing the actions of abnormal users to show when behavior is out of bounds, out of scope, or against the rules. The methods of mitigation are accomplished by secure coding techniques and the methods for phishing link detection are performed by various machine learning algorithms and deep learning techniques. The developed application has been tested and evaluated against various attack scenarios, the outcomes obtained from the test process showed that the website had successfully mitigated these dangerous web application attacks, and for the detection of phishing links part, a comparison is made between different algorithms to find the best one, and the outcome of the best model gave 98% accuracy.

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has found applications in different domains, including wired- and wireless networks. The SDN controller has a global view of the network topology, which is vulnerable to topology poisoning attacks, e.g., link fabrication and host-location hijacking. The adversaries can leverage these attacks to monitor the flows or drop them. However, current defence systems such as TopoGuard and TopoGuard+ can detect such attacks. In this paper, we introduce the Link Latency Attack (LLA) that can successfully bypass the systems' defence mechanisms above. In LLA, the adversary can add a fake link into the network and corrupt the controller's view from the network topology. This can be accomplished by compromising the end hosts without the need to attack the SDN-enabled switches. We develop a Machine Learning-based Link Guard (MLLG) system to provide the required defence for LLA. We test the performance of our system using an emulated network on Mininet, and the obtained results show an accuracy of 98.22% in detecting the attack. Interestingly, MLLG improves 16% the accuracy of TopoGuard+.

Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA) is a type of automatic program to determine whether the user is human or not. The most common type of CAPTCHA is a kind of message interpretation by twisting the letters and adding slight noises in the background, plays a role of verification code. In this paper, we will introduce the basis of Convolutional Neural Network first. Then based on the handwritten digit recognition using CNN, we will develop a network for CAPTCHA image recognition.