Biblio

This advanced research survey aims to perform intrusion detection and routing in ad hoc networks in wireless MANET networks using machine learning techniques. The MANETs are composed of several ad-hoc nodes that are randomly or deterministically distributed for communication and acquisition and to forward the data to the gateway for enhanced communication securely. MANETs are used in many applications such as in health care for communication; in utilities such as industries to monitor equipment and detect any malfunction during regular production activity. In general, MANETs take measurements of the desired application and send this information to a gateway, whereby the user can interpret the information to achieve the desired purpose. The main importance of MANETs in intrusion detection is that they can be trained to detect intrusion and real-time attacks in the CIC-IDS 2019 dataset. MANETs routing protocols are designed to establish routes between the source and destination nodes. What these routing protocols do is that they decompose the network into more manageable pieces and provide ways of sharing information among its neighbors first and then throughout the whole network. The landscape of exciting libraries and techniques is constantly evolving, and so are the possibilities and options for experiments. Implementing the framework in python helps in reducing syntactic complexity, increases performance compared to implementations in scripting languages, and provides memory safety.

Recently, named data networking (NDN) has been introduced to connect the world of computing devices via naming data instead of their containers. Through this strategic change, NDN brings several new features to network communication, including in-network caching, multipath forwarding, built-in multicast, and data security. Despite these unique features of NDN networking, there exist plenty of opportunities for continuing developments, especially with packet forwarding and caching. In this context, we introduce liteNDN, a novel forwarding and caching strategy for NDN networks. liteNDN comprises a cooperative forwarding strategy through which NDN routers share their knowledge, i.e. data names and interfaces, to optimize their packet forwarding decisions. Subsequently, liteNDN leverages that knowledge to estimate the probability of each downstream path to swiftly retrieve the requested data. Additionally, liteNDN exploits heuristics, such as routing costs and data significance, to make proper decisions about caching normal as well as segmented packets. The proposed approach has been extensively evaluated in terms of the data retrieval latency, network utilization, and the cache hit rate. The results showed that liteNDN, compared to conventional NDN forwarding and caching strategies, achieves much less latency while reducing the unnecessary traffic and caching activities.

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have given the cyber security industry a huge leverage with the possibility of having significantly autonomous models that can detect and prevent cyberattacks – even though there still exist some degree of human interventions. AI technologies have been utilized in gathering data which can then be processed into information that are valuable in the prevention of cyberattacks. These AI-based cybersecurity frameworks have commendable scalability about them and are able to detect malicious activities within the cyberspace in a prompter and more efficient manner than conventional security architectures. However, our one or two completed studies did not provide a complete and clear analyses to apply different machine learning algorithms on different media systems. Because of the existing methods of attack and the dynamic nature of malware or other unwanted software (adware etc.) it is important to automatically and systematically create, update and approve malicious packages that can be available to the public. Some of Complex tests have shown that DNN performs maybe can better than conventional machine learning classification. Finally, we present a multiple, large and hybrid DNN torrent structure called Scale-Hybrid-IDS-AlertNet, which can be used to effectively monitor to detect and review the impact of network traffic and host-level events to warn directly or indirectly about cyber-attacks. Besides this, they are also highly adaptable and flexible, with commensurate efficiency and accuracy when it comes to the detection and prevention of cyberattacks.There has been a multiplicity of AI-based cyber security architectures in recent years, and each of these has been found to show varying degree of effectiveness. Deep Neural Networks, which tend to be more complex and even more efficient, have been the major focus of research studies in recent times. In light of the foregoing, the objective of this paper is to discuss the use of AI methods in fighting cyberattacks like malware and DDoS attacks, with attention on DNN-based models.

In the coming future, Software-defined networking (SDN) will become a technology more responsive, fully automated, and highly secure. SDN is a way to manage networks by separate the control plane from the forwarding plane, by using software to manage network functions through a centralized control point. A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is the most popular malicious attempt to disrupt normal traffic of a targeted server, service, or network. The problem of the paper is the DDoS attack inside the SDN environment and how could use SDN specifications through the advantage of Open vSwitch programmability feature to stop the attack. This paper presents DDoS attack detection and mitigation in the SDN data-plane by applying a written SDN application in python language, based on the malicious traffic abnormal behavior to reduce the interference with normal traffic. The evaluation results reveal detection and mitigation time between 100 to 150 sec. The work also sheds light on the programming relevance with the open daylight controller over an abstracted view of the network infrastructure.

Botnets are a growing threat to the security of data and services on a global level. They exploit vulnerabilities in networks and host machines to harvest sensitive information, or make use of network resources such as memory or bandwidth in cyber-crime campaigns. Bot programs by nature are largely automated and systematic, and this is often used to detect them. In this paper, we extend upon existing work in this area by proposing a network event correlation method to produce graphs of flows generated by botnets, outlining the implementation and functionality of this approach. We also show how this method can be combined with statistical flow-based analysis to provide a descriptive chain of events, and test on public datasets with an overall success rate of 94.1%.

The Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) are either signature based or anomaly based. In this paper presented NIDS system belongs to anomaly based Neural Network Intrusion Detection System (NNIDS). The proposed NNIDS is able to successfully recognize learned malicious activities in a network environment. It was tested for the SYN flood attack, UDP flood attack, nMap scanning attack, and also for non-malicious communication.

The wireless spectrum is a scarce resource, and the number of wireless terminals is constantly growing. One way to mitigate this strong constraint for wireless traffic is the use of dynamic mechanisms to utilize the spectrum, such as cognitive and software-defined radios. This is especially important for the upcoming wireless sensor and actuator networks in aircraft, where real-time guarantees play an important role in the network. Future wireless networks in aircraft need to be scalable, cater to the specific requirements of avionics (e.g., standardization and certification), and provide interoperability with existing technologies. In this paper, we demonstrate that dynamic network reconfigurability is a solution to the aforementioned challenges. We supplement this claim by surveying several flexible approaches in the context of wireless sensor and actuator networks in aircraft. More specifically, we examine the concept of dynamic resource management, accomplished through more flexible transceiver hardware and by employing dedicated spectrum agents. Subsequently, we evaluate the advantages of cross-layer network architectures which overcome the fixed layering of current network stacks in an effort to provide quality of service for event-based and time-triggered traffic. Lastly, the challenges related to implementation of the aforementioned mechanisms in wireless sensor and actuator networks in aircraft are elaborated, and key requirements to future research are summarized.

Securing Internet of Things (IoT) systems is a challenge because of its multiple points of vulnerability. A spate of recent hacks and security breaches has unveiled glaring vulnerabilities in the IoT. Due to the computational and memory requirement constraints associated with anomaly detection algorithms in core networks, commercial in-line (part of the direct line of communication) Anomaly Detection Systems (ADSs) rely on sampling-based anomaly detection approaches to achieve line rates and truly-inline anomaly detection accuracy in real-time. However, packet sampling is inherently a lossy process which might provide an incomplete and biased approximation of the underlying traffic patterns. Moreover, commercial routers uses proprietary software making them closed to be manipulated from the outside. As a result, detecting malicious packets on the given network path is one of the most challenging problems in the field of network security. We argue that the advent of Software Defined Networking (SDN) provides a unique opportunity to effectively detect and mitigate DDoS attacks. Unlike sampling-based approaches for anomaly detection and limitation of proprietary software at routers, we use the SDN infrastructure to relax the sampling-based ADS constraints and collect traffic flow statistics which are maintained at each SDN-enabled switch to achieve high detection accuracy. In order to implement our idea, we discuss how to mitigate DDoS attacks using the features of SDN infrastructure.

Software defined Network is a network defined by software, which is one of the important feature which makes the legacy old networks to be flexible for dynamic configuration and so can cater to today's dynamic application requirement. It is a programmable network but it is prone to different type of attacks due to its centralized architecture. The author provided a solution to detect and prevent Distributed Denial of service attack in the paper. Mininet [5] which is a popular emulator for Software defined Network is used. We followed the approach in which collection of the traffic statistics from the various switches is done. After collection we calculated the packet rate and bandwidth which shoots up to high values when attack take place. The abrupt increase detects the attack which is then prevented by changing the forwarding logic of the host nodes to drop the packets instead of forwarding. After this, no more packets will be forwarded and then we also delete the forwarding rule in the flow table. Hence, we are finding out the change in packet rate and bandwidth to detect the attack and to prevent the attack we modify the forwarding logic of the switch flow table to drop the packets coming from malicious host instead of forwarding it.

This paper proposes a new cross-layer based packet scheduling scheme for multimedia traffic in satellite Long Term Evolution (LTE) network which adopts MIMO technology. The Satellite LTE air interface will provide global coverage and hence complement its terrestrial counterpart in the provision of mobile services (especially multimedia services) to users across the globe. A dynamic packet scheduling scheme is very important towards actualizing an effective utilization of the limited available resources in satellite LTE networks without compromise to the Quality of Service (QoS) demands of multimedia traffic. Hence, the need for an effective packet scheduling algorithm cannot be overemphasized. The aim of this paper is to propose a new scheduling algorithm tagged Cross-layer Based Queue-Aware (CBQA) Scheduler that will provide a good trade-off among QoS, fairness and throughput. The newly proposed scheduler is compared to existing ones through simulations and various performance indices have been used. A land mobile dual-polarized GEO satellite system has been considered for this work.
 

Anonymity platforms route the traffic over a network of special routers that are known as mixes and implement various traffic disruption techniques to hide the communicating users' identities. Batch mixes in particular anonymize communicating peers by allowing message exchange to take place only after a sufficient number of messages (a batch) accumulate, thus introducing delay. We introduce a queueing model for batch mix and study its delay properties. Our analysis shows that delay of a batch mix grows quickly as the batch size gets close to the number of senders connected to the mix. We then propose a randomized batch mixing strategy and show that it achieves much better delay scaling in terms of the batch size. However, randomization is shown to reduce the anonymity preserving capabilities of the mix. We also observe that queueing models are particularly useful to study anonymity metrics that are more practically relevant such as the time-to-deanonymize metric.

Nowadays, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have been depending on Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) approaches, which are the most precise techniques for traffic identification and classification. However, constructing high performance DPI approaches imposes a vigilant and an in-depth computing system design because the demands for the memory and processing power. Membership query data structures, specifically Bloom filter (BF), have been employed as a matching check tool in DPI approaches. It has been utilized to store signatures fingerprint in order to examine the presence of these signatures in the incoming network flow. The main issue that arise when employing Bloom filter in DPI approaches is the need to use k hash functions which, in turn, imposes more calculations overhead that degrade the performance. Consequently, in this paper, a new design and implementation for a DPI approach have been proposed. This DPI utilizes a membership query data structure called Cuckoo filter (CF) as a matching check tool. CF has many advantages over BF like: less memory consumption, less false positive rate, higher insert performance, higher lookup throughput, support delete operation. The achieved experiments show that the proposed approach offers better performance results than others that utilize Bloom filter.

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) is a sophisticated cyber-attack due to its variety of types and techniques. The traditional mitigation method of this attack is to deploy dedicated security appliances such as firewall, load balancer, etc. However, due to the limited capacity of the hardware and the potential high volume of DDoS traffic, it may not be able to defend all the attacks. Therefore, cloud-based DDoS protection services were introduced to allow the organizations to redirect their traffic to the scrubbing centers in the cloud for filtering. This solution has some drawbacks such as privacy violation and latency. More recently, Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and edge computing have been proposed as new networking service models. In this paper, we design a framework that leverages NFV and edge computing for DDoS mitigation through two-stage processes.

The use of Knuth's Rule and Bayesian Blocks constant piecewise models for characterization of RFID traffic has been proposed already. This study presents an evaluation of the application of those two modeling techniques for various RFID traffic patterns. The data sets used in this study consist of time series of binned RFID command counts. More specifically., we compare the shape of several empirical plots of raw data sets we obtained from experimental RIFD readings., against the constant piecewise graphs produced as an output of the two modeling algorithms. One issue limiting the applicability of modeling techniques to RFID traffic is the fact that there are a large number of various RFID applications available. We consider this phenomenon to present the main motivation for this study. The general expectation is that the RFID traffic traces from different applications would be sequences with different histogram shapes. Therefore., no modeling technique could be considered universal for modeling the traffic from multiple RFID applications., without first evaluating its model performance for various traffic patterns. We postulate that differences in traffic patterns are present if the histograms of two different sets of RFID traces form visually different plot shapes.

The growing trend toward information technology increases the amount of data travelling over the network links. The problem of detecting anomalies in data streams has increased with the growth of internet connectivity. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is a new concept of computer networking that can adapt and support these growing trends. However, the centralized nature of the SDN design is challenged by the need for an efficient method for traffic monitoring against traffic anomalies caused by misconfigured devices or ongoing attacks. In this paper, we propose a new model for traffic behavior monitoring that aims to ensure trusted communication links between the network devices. The main objective of this model is to confirm that the behavior of the traffic streams matches the instructions provided by the SDN controller, which can help to increase the trust between the SDN controller and its covered infrastructure components. According to our preliminary implementation, the behavior monitoring unit is able to read all traffic information and perform a validation process that reports any mismatching traffic to the controller.

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.

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a promising network architecture that aims at providing high flexibility through the separation between network logic (control plane) and forwarding functions (data plane). This separation provides logical centralization of controllers, global network overview, ease of programmability, and a range of new SDN-compliant services. In recent years, the adoption of SDN in enterprise networks has been constantly increasing. In the meantime, new challenges arise in different levels such as scalability, management, and security. In this paper, we elaborate on complex security issues in the current SDN architecture. Especially, reconnaissance attack where attackers generate traffic for the goal of exploring existing services, assets, and overall network topology. To eliminate reconnaissance attack in SDN environment, we propose SDN-based solution by utilizing distributed firewall application, security policy, and OpenFlow counters. Distributed firewall application is capable of tracking the flow based on pre-defined states that would monitor the connection to sensitive nodes toward malicious activity. We utilize Mininet to simulate the testing environment. We are able to detect and mitigate this type of attack at early stage and in average around 7 second.

To accommodate the rapidly changing Internet requirements, Information-Centric Networking (ICN) was recently introduced as a promising architecture for the future Internet. One of the ICN primary features is `in-network caching'; due to its ability to minimize network traffic and respond faster to users' requests. Therefore, various caching algorithms have been presented that aim to enhance the network performance using different measures, such as cache hit ratio and cache hit distance. Choosing a caching strategy is critical, and an adequate replacement strategy is also required to decide which content should be dropped. Thus, in this paper, we propose a content replacement scheme for ICN, called Randomized LFU that is implemented with respect to content popularity taking the time complexity into account. We use Abilene and Tree network topologies in our simulation models. The proposed replacement achieves encouraging results in terms of the cache hit ratio, inner hit, and hit distance and it outperforms FIFO, LRU, and Random replacement strategies.

Customer Edge Switching (CES) is an experimental Internet architecture that provides reliable and resilient multi-domain communications. It provides resilience against security threats because domains negotiate inbound and outbound policies before admitting new traffic. As CES and its signalling protocols are being prototyped, there is a need for independent testing of the CES architecture. Hence, our research goal is to develop an automated test framework that CES protocol designers and early adopters can use to improve the architecture. The test framework includes security, functional, and performance tests. Using the Robot Framework and STRIDE analysis, in this paper we present this automated security test framework. By evaluating sample test scenarios, we show that the Robot Framework and our CES test suite have provided productive discussions about this new architecture, in addition to serving as clear, easy-to-read documentation. Our research also confirms that test automation can be useful to improve new protocol architectures and validate their implementation.

Cyber attacks against automobiles have increased over the last decade due to the expansion in attack surfaces. This is the result of modern automobiles having connections such as Bluetooth, WiFi, and other broadband services. While there has been numerous proposed solutions in the literature, none have been widely adopted as maintaining real-time message deliverability in the Controller Area Networks (CAN) outweighs proposed security solutions. Through iterative research, we have developed a solution which mitigates an attacker's impact on the CAN bus by using CAN's inherent features of arbitration, error detection and signaling, and fault confinement mechanism. The solution relies on an access controller and message priority thresholds added to the CAN data-link layer. The results provide no time delay for non-malicious traffic and mitigates bus impact of a subverted node attempting to fabricate messages at an unauthorized priority level.

The distribution of video contents generated by Content Providers (CPs) significantly contributes to increase the congestion within the networks of Internet Service Providers (ISPs). To alleviate this problem, CPs can serve a portion of their catalogues to the end users directly from servers (i.e., the caches) located inside the ISP network. Users served from caches perceive an increased QoS (e.g., average retrieval latency is reduced) and, for this reason, caching can be considered a form of traffic prioritization. Hence, since the storage of caches is limited, its subdivision among several CPs may lead to discrimination. A static subdivision that assignes to each CP the same portion of storage is a neutral but ineffective appraoch, because it does not consider the different popularities of the CPs' contents. A more effective strategy consists in dividing the cache among the CPs proportionally to the popularity of their contents. However, CPs consider this information sensitive and are reluctant to disclose it. In this work, we propose a protocol based on Shamir Secret Sharing (SSS) scheme that allows the ISP to calculate the portion of cache storage that a CP is entitled to receive while guaranteeing network neutrality and resource efficiency, but without violating its privacy. The protocol is executed by the ISP, the CPs and a Regulator Authority (RA) that guarantees the actual enforcement of a fair subdivision of the cache storage and the preservation of privacy. We perform extensive simulations and prove that our approach leads to higher hit-rates (i.e., percentage of requests served by the cache) with respect to the static one. The advantages are particularly significant when the cache storage is limited.

The Internet has evolved to the point that gigabytes and even terabytes of data are generated and processed on a daily basis. Such a stream of data is characterised by high volume, velocity and variety and is referred to as Big Data. Traditional data processing tools can no longer be used to process big data, because they were not designed to handle such a massive amount of data. This problem concerns also cyber security, where tools like intrusion detection systems employ classification algorithms to analyse the network traffic. Achieving a high accuracy attack detection becomes harder when the amount of data increases and the algorithms must be efficient enough to keep up with the throughput of a huge data stream. Due to the challenges posed by a big data environment, some monitoring systems have already shifted from deep packet inspection to flow-level inspection. The goal of this paper is to evaluate the applicability of an existing intrusion detection technique that performs deep packet inspection in a big data setting. We have conducted several experiments with Apache Spark to assess the performance of the technique when classifying anomalous packets, showing that it benefits from the use of Spark.

Smart grid architecture and Software-defined Networking (SDN) have evolved into a centrally controlled infrastructure that captures and extracts data in real-time through sensors, smart-meters, and virtual machines. These advances pose a risk and increase the vulnerabilities of these infrastructures to sophisticated cyberattacks like distributed denial of service (DDoS), false data injection attack (FDIA), and Data replay. Integrating machine learning with a network intrusion detection system (NIDS) can improve the system's accuracy and precision when detecting suspicious signatures and network anomalies. Analyzing data in real-time using trained and tested hyperparameters on a network traffic dataset applies to most network infrastructures. The NSL-KDD dataset implemented holds various classes, attack types, protocol suites like TCP, HTTP, and POP, which are critical to packet transmission on a smart grid network. In this paper, we leveraged existing machine learning (ML) algorithms, Support vector machine (SVM), K-nearest neighbor (KNN), Random Forest (RF), Naïve Bayes (NB), and Bagging; to perform a detailed performance comparison of selected classifiers. We propose a multi-level hybrid model of SVM integrated with RF for improved accuracy and precision during network filtering. The hybrid model SVM-RF returned an average accuracy of 94% in 10-fold cross-validation and 92.75%in an 80-20% split during class classification.

Scalability is an important design factor for evaluating the performance of routing protocols as the network size or traffic load increases. One of the most appropriate design methods is to use geographic routing approach to ensure scalability. This paper describes a scalability study comparing Secure Region Based Geographic Routing (SRBGR) and Dynamic Window Secure Implicit Geographic Forwarding (DWSIGF) protocols in various network density scenarios based on an end-to-end delay performance metric. The simulation studies were conducted in MATLAB 2106b where the network densities were varied according to the network topology size with increasing traffic rates. The results showed that DWSIGF has a lower end-to-end delay as compared to SRBGR for both sparse (15.4%) and high density (63.3%) network scenarios.Despite SRBGR having good security features, there is a need to improve the performance of its end-to-end delay to fulfil the application requirements.