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1. Hidden Markov Model Enabled Prediction and Visualization of Cyber Agility in IoT era

   https://doi.org/10.1109/JIOT.2021.3056118  

   Muhati, Eric ; Rawat, Danda B. ( February 2021 , IEEE Internet of Things Journal)

   null (Ed.)

   Cyber-threats are continually evolving and growing in numbers and extreme complexities with the increasing connectivity of the Internet of Things (IoT). Existing cyber-defense tools seem not to deter the number of successful cyber-attacks reported worldwide. If defense tools are not seldom, why does the cyber-chase trend favor bad actors? Although cyber-defense tools monitor and try to diffuse intrusion attempts, research shows the required agility speed against evolving threats is way too slow. One of the reasons is that many intrusion detection tools focus on anomaly alerts’ accuracy, assuming that pre-observed attacks and subsequent security patches are adequate. Well, that is not the case. In fact, there is a need for techniques that go beyond intrusion accuracy against specific vulnerabilities to the prediction of cyber-defense performance for improved proactivity. This paper proposes a combination of cyber-attack projection and cyber-defense agility estimation to dynamically but reliably augur intrusion detection performance. Since cyber-security is buffeted with many unknown parameters and rapidly changing trends, we apply a machine learning (ML) based hidden markov model (HMM) to predict intrusion detection agility. HMM is best known for robust prediction of temporal relationships mid noise and training brevity corroborating our high prediction accuracy on three major open-source network intrusion detection systems, namely Zeek, OSSEC, and Suricata. Specifically, we present a novel approach for combined projection, prediction, and cyber-visualization to enable precise agility analysis of cyber defense. We also evaluate the performance of the developed approach using numerical results. 

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2. Algorithms and Frameworks for Accelerating Security Applications on HPC Platforms

   YU, Xiaodong ( August 2019 , Virginia Tech Theses)

   Typical cybersecurity solutions emphasize on achieving defense functionalities. However, execution efficiency and scalability are equally important, especially for real-world deployment. Straightforward mappings of cybersecurity applications onto HPC platforms may significantly underutilize the HPC devices’ capacities. On the other hand, the sophisticated implementations are quite difficult: they require both in-depth understandings of cybersecurity domain-specific characteristics and HPC architecture and system model. In our work, we investigate three sub-areas in cybersecurity, including mobile software security, network security, and system security. They have the following performance issues, respectively: 1) The flow- and context-sensitive static analysis for the large and complex Android APKs are incredibly time-consuming. Existing CPU-only frameworks/tools have to set a timeout threshold to cease the program analysis to trade the precision for performance. 2) Network intrusion detection systems (NIDS) use automata processing as its searching core and requires line-speed processing. However, achieving high-speed automata processing is exceptionally difficult in both algorithm and implementation aspects. 3) It is unclear how the cache configurations impact time-driven cache side-channel attacks’ performance. This question remains open because it is difficult to conduct comparative measurement to study the impacts. In this dissertation, we demonstrate how application-specific characteristics can be leveraged to optimize implementations on various types of HPC for faster and more scalable cybersecurity executions. For example, we present a new GPU-assisted framework and a collection of optimization strategies for fast Android static data-flow analysis that achieve up to 128X speedups against the plain GPU implementation. For network intrusion detection systems (IDS), we design and implement an algorithm capable of eliminating the state explosion in out-of-order packet situations, which reduces up to 400X of the memory overhead. We also present tools for improving the usability of Micron’s Automata Processor. To study the cache configurations’ impact on time-driven cache side-channel attacks’ performance, we design an approach to conducting comparative measurement. We propose a quantifiable success rate metric to measure the performance of time-driven cache attacks and utilize the GEM5 platform to emulate the configurable cache. 

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3. The intrinsic dimensionality of network datasets and its applications1

   https://doi.org/10.3233/JCS-220131  

   Gorbett, Matt ; Siebert, Caspian ; Shirazi, Hossein ; Ray, Indrakshi ( November 2023 , Journal of Computer Security)

   Sural, Shamik ; Lu, Haibing (Ed.)

   Modern network infrastructures are in a constant state of transformation, in large part due to the exponential growth of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. The unique properties of IoT-connected networks, such as heterogeneity and non-standardized protocol, have created critical security holes and network mismanagement. In this paper we propose a new measurement tool, Intrinsic Dimensionality (ID), to aid in analyzing and classifying network traffic. A proxy for dataset complexity, ID can be used to understand the network as a whole, aiding in tasks such as network management and provisioning. We use ID to evaluate several modern network datasets empirically. Showing that, for network and device-level data, generated using IoT methodologies, the ID of the data fits into a low dimensional representation. Additionally we explore network data complexity at the sample level using Local Intrinsic Dimensionality (LID) and propose a novel unsupervised intrusion detection technique, the Weighted Hamming LID Estimator. We show that the algortihm performs better on IoT network datasets than the Autoencoder, KNN, and Isolation Forests. Finally, we propose the use of synthetic data as an additional tool for both network data measurement as well as intrusion detection. Synthetically generated data can aid in building a more robust network dataset, while also helping in downstream tasks such as machine learning based intrusion detection models. We explore the effects of synthetic data on ID measurements, as well as its role in intrusion detection systems.

    

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4. A Machine Learning Approach for Anomaly Detection in Industrial Control Systems Based on Measurement Data

   https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics10040407  

   Mokhtari, Sohrab ; Abbaspour, Alireza ; Yen, Kang ; Sargolzaei, Arman ( February 2021 , Electronics)

   Attack detection problems in industrial control systems (ICSs) are commonly known as a network traffic monitoring scheme for detecting abnormal activities. However, a network-based intrusion detection system can be deceived by attackers that imitate the system’s normal activity. In this work, we proposed a novel solution to this problem based on measurement data in the supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system. The proposed approach is called measurement intrusion detection system (MIDS), which enables the system to detect any abnormal activity in the system even if the attacker tries to conceal it in the system’s control layer. A supervised machine learning model is generated to classify normal and abnormal activities in an ICS to evaluate the MIDS performance. A hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testbed is developed to simulate the power generation units and exploit the attack dataset. In the proposed approach, we applied several machine learning models on the dataset, which show remarkable performances in detecting the dataset’s anomalies, especially stealthy attacks. The results show that the random forest is performing better than other classifier algorithms in detecting anomalies based on measured data in the testbed.

    

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5. A Transfer Learning with Deep Neural Network Approach for Network Intrusion Detection

   Mohammad Masum, Hossain Shahriar ( April 2021 , International journal of intellligent computing research)

   Ayahiko Niimi, Future University-Hakodate (Ed.)

   Traditional Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) encounter difficulties due to the exponential growth of network traffic data and modern attacks' requirements. This paper presents a novel network intrusion classification framework using transfer learning from the VGG-16 pre-trained model. The framework extracts feature leveraging pre-trained weights trained on the ImageNet dataset in the initial step, and finally, applies a deep neural network to the extracted features for intrusion classification. We applied the presented framework on NSL-KDD, a benchmark dataset for network intrusion, to evaluate the proposed framework's performance. We also implemented other pre-trained models such as VGG19, MobileNet, ResNet-50, and Inception V3 to evaluate and compare performance. This paper also displays both binary classification (normal vs. attack) and multi-class classification (classifying types of attacks) for network intrusion detection. The experimental results show that feature extraction using VGG-16 outperforms other pre-trained models producing better accuracy, precision, recall, and false alarm rates. 

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