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1. Deep Learning for Encrypted Traffic Classification: An Overview

   Rezaei, Shahbaz; Liu, Xin (January 2019, IEEE communications magazine)

   Traffic classification has been studied for two decades and applied to a wide range of applications from QoS provisioning and billing in ISPs to security-related applications in firewalls and intrusion detection systems. Port-based, data packet inspection, and classical machine learning methods have been used extensively in the past, but their accuracy have been declined due to the dramatic changes in the Internet traffic, particularly the increase in encrypted traffic. With the proliferation of deep learning methods, researchers have recently investigated these methods for traffic classification task and reported high accuracy. In this article, we introduce a general framework for deep-learning-based traffic classification. We present commonly used deep learning methods and their application in traffic classification tasks. Then, we discuss open 

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2. Multitask Learning for Network Traffic Classification

   https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCCN49398.2020.9209652  

   Rezaei, Shahbaz; Liu, Xin (August 2020, 29th International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (ICCCN))

   null (Ed.)

   Traffic classification has various applications in today's Internet, from resource allocation, billing and QoS purposes in ISPs to firewall and malware detection in clients. Classical machine learning algorithms and deep learning models have been widely used to solve the traffic classification task. However, training such models requires a large amount of labeled data. Labeling data is often the most difficult and time-consuming process in building a classifier. To solve this challenge, we reformulate the traffic classification into a multi-task learning framework where bandwidth requirement and duration of a flow are predicted along with the traffic class. The motivation of this approach is twofold: First, the bandwidth requirement and duration are useful in many applications, including routing, resource allocation, and QoS provisioning. Second, these two values can be obtained from each flow easily without the need for human labeling or capturing flows in a controlled and isolated environment. We show that with a large amount of easily obtainable data samples for bandwidth and duration prediction tasks, and only a few data samples for the traffic classification task, one can achieve high accuracy. Therefore, our proposed multi-task learning framework obviates the need for a large labeled traffic dataset. We conduct two experiments with ISCX and QUIC public datasets and show the efficacy of our approach 

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3. Deep transfer learning-based vehicle classification by asphalt pavement vibration

   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.conbuildmat.2022.127997  

   Liu, Fangyu; Ye, Zhoujing; Wang, Linbing (August 2022, Construction and Building Materials)

   NA (Ed.)

   Deep transfer learning (TL) has great potential for a wide range of applications in civil engineering. This work aims to propose a deep transfer learning-based method for vehicle classification by asphalt pavement vibration. This work first used the pavement vibration IoT monitoring system to collect raw vibration signals and performed the wavelet transform to obtain denoised vibration signals. The vibration signals were then represented in two different ways, including the time-domain graph and the time-frequency graph. Finally, two deep transfer learning-based methods, namely Method Ⅰ (Time-domain & TL) and Method Ⅱ (Time-frequency & TL), were applied for vehicle classification according to the two different representations of vibration signals. The results show that the CNN model had a satisfactory performance in both methods with the accuracy of Method Ⅰ exceeding 0.94 and Method Ⅱ exceeding 0.95. The CNN model in Method Ⅱ performed better in the accuracy metrics with considering label imbalance, but worse in the accuracy metrics without considering label imbalance than that in Method Ⅰ. The differences between these two methods have been investigated and discussed in detail in terms of input types, accuracy metrics, and application prospects. The CNN model with deep transfer learning could be an effective, accurate, and reliable technique for vehicle classification based on asphalt pavement vibration. 

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4. Poster: Evaluating Security Metrics for Website Fingerprinting

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3319535.3363272  

   Mathews, Nate; Rahman, Mohammad Saidur; Wright, Matthew (November 2019, CCS '19: Proceedings of the 2019 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security)

   The website fingerprinting attack allows a low-resource attacker to compromise the privacy guarantees provided by privacy enhancing tools such as Tor. In response, researchers have proposed defenses aimed at confusing the classification tools used by attackers. As new, more powerful attacks are frequently developed, raw attack accuracy has proven inadequate as the sole metric used to evaluate these defenses. In response, two security metrics have been proposed that allow for evaluating defenses based on hand-crafted features often used in attacks. Recent state-of-the-art attacks, however, use deep learning models capable of automatically learning abstract feature representations, and thus the proposed metrics fall short once again. In this study we examine two security metrics and (1) show how these methods can be extended to evaluate deep learning-based website fingerprinting attacks, and (2) compare the security metrics and identify their shortcomings. 

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5. Adversarial-Aware Deep Learning System Based on a Secondary Classical Machine Learning Verification Approach

   https://doi.org/10.3390/s23146287  

   Alkhowaiter, Mohammed; Kholidy, Hisham; Alyami, Mnassar A.; Alghamdi, Abdulmajeed; Zou, Cliff (July 2023, Sensors)

   Deep learning models have been used in creating various effective image classification applications. However, they are vulnerable to adversarial attacks that seek to misguide the models into predicting incorrect classes. Our study of major adversarial attack models shows that they all specifically target and exploit the neural networking structures in their designs. This understanding led us to develop a hypothesis that most classical machine learning models, such as random forest (RF), are immune to adversarial attack models because they do not rely on neural network design at all. Our experimental study of classical machine learning models against popular adversarial attacks supports this hypothesis. Based on this hypothesis, we propose a new adversarial-aware deep learning system by using a classical machine learning model as the secondary verification system to complement the primary deep learning model in image classification. Although the secondary classical machine learning model has less accurate output, it is only used for verification purposes, which does not impact the output accuracy of the primary deep learning model, and, at the same time, can effectively detect an adversarial attack when a clear mismatch occurs. Our experiments based on the CIFAR-100 dataset show that our proposed approach outperforms current state-of-the-art adversarial defense systems. 

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