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Creators/Authors contains: "Ahamed, Sheikh Iqbal"

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  1. This work introduces an novel approach to improving cybersecurity systems to focus on spam email-based cyberattacks. The proposed technique tackles the challenge of training Machine Learning (ML) models with limited data samples by leveraging Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) for contextualized embeddings. Unlike traditional embedding methods, BERT offers a nuanced representation of smaller datasets, enabling more effective ML model training. The methodology will use several pre-trained BERT models for generating contextualized embeddings using data samples, and these embeddings will be fed to various ML algorithms for effective training. This approach demonstrates that even with scarce data, BERT embeddings significantly enhance model performance compared to conventional embedding approaches like Word2Vec. The technique proves especially advantageous for insufficient instances of high-quality dataset. The result of this proposed work outperforms traditional techniques to mitigate phishing attacks with few data samples. This work provides a robust accuracy of 99.25% when we use multilingual BERT (M-BERT) to embed dataset. 
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  2. With the rapid growth of technology, accessing digital health records has become increasingly easier. Especially mobile health technology like mHealth apps help users to manage their health information, as well as store, share and access medical records and treatment information. Along with this huge advancement, mHealth apps are increasingly at risk of exposing protected health information (PHI) when security measures are not adequately implemented. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) ensures the secure handling of PHI, and mHealth applications are required to comply with its standards. But it is unfortunate to note that many mobile and mHealth app developers, along with their security teams, lack sufficient awareness of HIPAA regulations, leading to inadequate implementation of compliance measures. Moreover, the implementation of HIPAA security should be integrated into applications from the earliest stages of development to ensure data security and regulatory adherence throughout the software lifecycle. This highlights the need for a comprehensive framework that supports developers from the initial stages of mHealth app development and fosters HIPAA compliance awareness among security teams and end users. An iOS framework has been designed for integration into the Integrated Development Environment(IDE), accompanied by a web application to visualize HIPAA security concerns in mHealth app development. The web application is intended to guide both developers and security teams on HIPAA compliance, offering insights on incorporating regulations into source code, with the IDE framework enabling the identification and resolution of compliance violations during development. The aim is to encourage the design of secure and compliant mHealth applications that effectively safeguard personal health information. 
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  3. Reinforcement learning (RL) is being used more in medical imaging for segmentation, detection, registration, and classification. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of RL techniques applied in this domain, categorizing the literature based on clinical task, imaging modality, learning paradigm, and algorithmic design. We introduce a unified taxonomy that supports reproducibility, highlights design guidance, and identifies underexplored intersections. Furthermore, we examine the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) for automation and interpretability, and discuss privacy-preserving extensions using Differential Privacy (DP) and Federated Learning (FL). Finally, we address deployment challenges and outline future research directions toward trustworthy and scalable medical RL systems. 
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  4. The growing complexity and volume of ransomware attacks demand advanced detection techniques that can effectively model dependencies within high-dimensional data. Traditional machine learning methods often struggle to capture nuanced relationships among features in such cybersecurity datasets. To address this, we propose a novel approach to transform non-text data samples into textual data to fine-tune Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model with optimized parameters. By leveraging BERT’s multi head self-attention mechanism, our method embeds non-textual ransomware data into semantic textual data so that multi-heads can make relationships and dependencies of tokens in different perspectives to transform instances to comprehensive latent representations where inter-feature dependencies are effectively present. This allows BERT to understand contextual relevance among tokens, leading to superior classification performance. Our evaluation demonstrates that the proposed BERT model outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving a classification accuracy of 99.21%, surpassing ensemble models (99.0%) and LSTM-based approaches (98.5%). The important finding of this novel approach is that one-third of the data points have been used to outperform other existing works. It highlights its potential and adaptability in cybersecurity domains whenever a text dataset is absent to use the natural language context for the model. 
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  5. With the rapid growth of technology, accessing digital health records has become increasingly easier. Especially mobile health technology like mHealth apps help users to manage their health information, as well as store, share and access medical records and treatment information. Along with this huge advancement, mHealth apps are increasingly at risk of exposing protected health information (PHI) when security measures are not adequately implemented. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) ensures the secure handling of PHI, and mHealth applications are required to comply with its standards. But it is unfortunate to note that many mobile and mHealth app developers, along with their security teams, lack sufficient awareness of HIPAA regulations, leading to inadequate implementation of compliance measures. Moreover, the implementation of HIPAA security should be integrated into applications from the earliest stages of development to ensure data security and regulatory adherence throughout the software lifecycle. This highlights the need for a comprehensive framework that supports developers from the initial stages of mHealth app development and fosters HIPAA compliance awareness among security teams and end users. An iOS framework has been designed for integration into the Integrated Development Environment(IDE), accompanied by a web application to visualize HIPAA security concerns in mHealth app development. The web application is intended to guide both developers and security teams on HIPAA compliance, offering insights on incorporating regulations into source code, with the IDE framework enabling the identification and resolution of compliance violations during development. The aim is to encourage the design of secure and compliant mHealth applications that effectively safeguard personal health information. 
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  6. Large language models (LLMs) are becoming a popular tool as they have significantly advanced in their capability to tackle a wide range of language-based tasks. However, LLMs applications are highly vulnerable to prompt injection attacks, which poses a critical problem. These attacks target LLMs applications through using carefully designed input prompts to divert the model from adhering to original instruction, thereby it could execute unintended actions. These manipulations pose serious security threats which potentially results in data leaks, biased outputs, or harmful responses. This project explores the security vulnerabilities in relation to prompt injection attacks. To detect whether a prompt is vulnerable or not, we follows two approaches: 1) a pre-trained LLM, and 2) a fine-tuned LLM. Then, we conduct a thorough analysis and comparison of the classification performance. Firstly, we use pre-trained XLMRoBERTa model to detect prompt injections using test dataset without any fine-tuning and evaluate it by zero-shot classification. Then, this proposed work will apply supervised fine-tuning to this pre-trained LLM using a task-specific labeled dataset from deepset in huggingface, and this fine-tuned model achieves impressive results with 99.13% accuracy, 100% precision, 98.33% recall and 99.15% F1-score thorough rigorous experimentation and evaluation. We observe that our approach is highly efficient in detecting prompt injection attacks. 
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