Biblio

Malware such as metamorphic virus changes its codes and it cannot be detected by pattern matching. Such malware can be detected by surface analysis, dynamic analysis or static analysis. We focused on surface analysis since neither virtual environments nor high level engineering is required. A representative method in surface analysis is n-gram with machine learning. On the other hand, important features are sometimes cut off by n-gram since n is not variable in some existing methods. Hence, scores of malware detection methods are not perfect. Moreover, creating n-gram features takes long time for comparing files. Furthermore, in some n-gram methods, invisible malware can be created when the methods are known to attackers. Therefore, we proposed a new malware subspecies detection method by suffix arrays and machine learning. We evaluated the method with four real malware subspecies families and succeeded to classify them with almost 100% accuracy.

Nowadays, we have witnessed the early progress on learning the association between voice and face automatically, which brings a new wave of studies to the computer vision community. However, most of the prior arts along this line (a) merely adopt local information to perform modality alignment and (b) ignore the diversity of learning difficulty across different subjects. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to jointly address the above-mentioned issues. Targeting at (a), we propose a two-level modality alignment loss where both global and local information are considered. Compared with the existing methods, we introduce a global loss into the modality alignment process. The global component of the loss is driven by the identity classification. Theoretically, we show that minimizing the loss could maximize the distance between embeddings across different identities while minimizing the distance between embeddings belonging to the same identity, in a global sense (instead of a mini-batch). Targeting at (b), we propose a dynamic reweighting scheme to better explore the hard but valuable identities while filtering out the unlearnable identities. Experiments show that the proposed method outperforms the previous methods in multiple settings, including voice-face matching, verification and retrieval.

One of the main goals of studying pattern matching techniques is their significant role in real-world applications, such as the intrusion detection systems branch. The purpose of the network attack detection systems NIDS is to protect the infocommunication network from unauthorized access. This article provides an analysis of the exact match and fuzzy matching methods, and discusses a new implementation of the classic Aho-Korasik pattern matching algorithm at the hardware level. The proposed approach to the implementation of the Aho-Korasik algorithm can make it possible to ensure the efficient use of resources, such as memory and energy.

Integration as a service (INTaaS) is the centrepiece of current corporate, cloud and device integration processes. Thereby, compositions of integration patterns denote the required integration logic as integration processes, currently running in single-clouds. While multicloud settings gain importance, their promised freedom of selecting the best option for a specific problem is currently not realized as well as security constraints are handled in a cost-intensive manner for the INTaaS vendors, leading to security vs. costs goal conflicts.In this work, we propose a design-time placement for processes in multiclouds that is cost-optimal for the INTaaS vendors, and respects configurable security constraints of their customers. To make the solution tractable for larger, productive INTaaS processes, it is relaxed using local search heuristics. The approach is evaluated on real-world integration processes with respect to cost- and runtime-efficiency, and discusses interesting trade-offs.

YARA rules utilises string or pattern matching to perform malware analysis and is one of the most effective methods in use today. However, its effectiveness is dependent on the quality and quantity of YARA rules employed in the analysis. This can be managed through the rule optimisation process, although, this may not necessarily guarantee effective utilisation of YARA rules and its generated findings during its execution phase, as the main focus of YARA rules is in determining whether to trigger a rule or not, for a suspect sample after examining its rule condition. YARA rule conditions are Boolean expressions, mostly focused on the binary outcome of the malware analysis, which may limit the optimised use of YARA rules and its findings despite generating significant information during the execution phase. Therefore, this paper proposes embedding fuzzy rules with YARA rules to optimise its performance during the execution phase. Fuzzy rules can manage imprecise and incomplete data and encompass a broad range of conditions, which may not be possible in Boolean logic. This embedding may be more advantageous when the YARA rules become more complex, resulting in multiple complex conditions, which may not be processed efficiently utilising Boolean expressions alone, thus compromising effective decision-making. This proposed embedded approach is applied on a collected malware corpus and is tested against the standard and enhanced YARA rules to demonstrate its success.

Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) is an essential building block implementing various services on data plane [5]. Usually, DPI engines are centered around efficient implementation of regular expressions both from the required memory and lookup time perspectives. In this paper, we explore and generalize original approaches used for packet classifiers [7] to regular expressions. Our preliminary results establish a promising direction for the efficient implementation of DPI engines.

More than 75% of the Internet traffic is now encrypted, while this percentage is constantly increasing. The majority of communications are secured using common encryption protocols such as SSL/TLS and IPsec to ensure security and protect the privacy of Internet users. Yet, encryption can be exploited to hide malicious activities. Traditionally, network traffic inspection is based on techniques like deep packet inspection (DPI). Common applications for DPI include but are not limited to firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention systems, L7 filtering and packet forwarding. The core functionality of such DPI implementations is based on pattern matching that enables searching for specific strings or regular expressions inside the packet contents. With the widespread adoption of network encryption though, DPI tools that rely on packet payload content are becoming less effective, demanding the development of more sophisticated techniques in order to adapt to current network encryption trends. In this work, we present HeaderHunter, a fast signature-based intrusion detection system even in encrypted network traffic. We generate signatures using only network packet metadata extracted from packet headers. Also, to cope with the ever increasing network speeds, we accelerate the inner computations of our proposed system using off-the-shelf GPUs.

Network traffic classification has a range of applications in network management including QoS and security monitoring. Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) is one of the effective method used for traffic classification. DPI is computationally expensive operation involving string matching between payload and application signatures. Existing traffic classification techniques perform multiple scans of payload to classify the application flows - first scan to extract the words and the second scan to match the words with application signatures. In this paper we propose an approach which can classify network flows with single scan of flow payloads using a heuristic method to achieve a sub-linear search complexity. The idea is to scan few initial bytes of payload and determine potential application signature(s) for subsequent signature matching. We perform experiments with a large dataset containing 171873 network flows and show that it has a good classification accuracy of 98%.

Bitcoin [1] as a popular digital currency has been a target of theft and other illegal activities. Key to the forensic investigation is to identify bitcoin addresses involved in bitcoin transfers. This paper presents a framework, FABT, for forensic analysis of bitcoin transactions by identifying suspicious bitcoin addresses. It formalizes the clues of a given case as transaction patterns defined over a comprehensive set of features. FABT converts the bitcoin transaction data into a formal model, called Bitcoin Transaction Net (BTN). The traverse of all bitcoin transactions in the order of their occurrences is captured by the firing sequence of all transitions in the BTN. We have applied FABT to identify suspicious addresses in the Mt.Gox case. A subgroup of the suspicious addresses has been found to share many characteristics about the received/transferred amount, number of transactions, and time intervals.

Given two strings: pattern p of length m and text t of length n. The string matching problem is to find all (or some) occurrences of the pattern p in the text t. We introduce a new simple data structure, called index arrays, and design fast privacy-preserving matching algorithm for string matching. The motivation behind introducing index arrays is determined by the need for pattern matching on distributed cloud-based datasets with semi-trusted cloud providers. It is intended to use encrypted index arrays both to improve performance and protect confidentiality and privacy of user data.

Accurate network traffic identification is an important basis for network traffic monitoring and data analysis, and is the key to improve the quality of user service. In this paper, through the analysis of two network traffic identification methods based on machine learning and deep packet inspection, a network traffic identification method based on machine learning and deep packet inspection is proposed. This method uses deep packet inspection technology to identify most network traffic, reduces the workload that needs to be identified by machine learning method, and deep packet inspection can identify specific application traffic, and improves the accuracy of identification. Machine learning method is used to assist in identifying network traffic with encryption and unknown features, which makes up for the disadvantage of deep packet inspection that can not identify new applications and encrypted traffic. Experiments show that this method can improve the identification rate of network traffic.

The emergence of integrated space-ground network (ISGN), with more complex network conditions compared with tradition network, requires packet classification to achieve high performance. Packet classification plays an important role in the field of network security. Although several existing classification schemes have been proposed recently to improve classification performance, the performance of these schemes is unable to meet the high-speed packet classification requirement in ISGN. To tackle this problem, a hybrid packet classification algorithm based on hash table and geometric space partition (HGSP) is proposed in this paper. HGSP falls into two sections: geometric space partition and hash matching. To improve the classification speed under the same accuracy, a parallel structure of hash table is designed to match the huge packets for classifying. The experimental results demonstrate that the matching time of HGSP algorithm is reduced by 40%-70% compared with traditional Hicuts algorithm. Particularly, with the growth of ruleset, the advantage of HGSP algorithm will become more obvious.

This paper proposes the implementation of progressive authentication service in smart android mobile phone. In this digital era, massive amount of work can be done in the digital form using the smart devices like smart phone , laptop, Tablets, etc. The number of smartphone users approx. reach to 299.24 million, as per the recent survey report [1] in 2019 this count will reach 2.7 billion and after 3 years, this count will increase up to 442.5 million. This article includes a cluster based progressive smart lock with a dependent combination that is short and more secure in nature. Android provides smart lock facilities with the combination of 9 dot, 6dot, 5dot, 4dot and 1-9 number. By using this mobile phone user will be able to generate pattern lock or number password for authentication. This is a single authentication system, this research paper includes a more secured multiple cluster based pattern match system.

This paper presents an algebraic approach for formalizing and detecting vulnerabilities in binary code. It uses behaviour algebra equations for creating patterns of vulnerabilities and algebraic matching methods for vulnerability detection. Algebraic matching is based on symbolic modelling. This paper considers a known vulnerability, buffer overflow, as an example to demonstrate an algebraic approach for pattern creation.

Aiming at malicious application flooding in mobile application market, this paper proposed a method based on rule matching for mobile application local denial of service vulnerability detection. By combining the advantages of static detection and dynamic detection, static detection adopts smali abstract syntax tree as rule matching object. This static detection method has higher code coverage and better guarantees the integrity of mobile application information. The dynamic detection performs targeted hook verification on the static detection result, which improves the accuracy of the detection result and saves the test workload at the same time. This dynamic detection method has good scalability, can be upgraded with discovery and variants of the vulnerability. Through experiments, it is verified that the mobile application with this vulnerability can be accurately found in a large number of mobile applications, and the effectiveness of the system is verified.

This study introduces formal methods for detection of vulnerabilities in binary code. It considers the transformation of binary code into behavior algebra expressions and formalization of vulnerabilities. The detection method has two levels: behavior matching and symbolic execution with vulnerability pattern matching. This enables more efficient performance.

This paper proposes the implementation of progressive authentication service in smart android mobile phone. In this digital era, massive amount of work can be done in the digital form using the smart devices like smart phone , laptop, Tablets, etc. The number of smartphone users approx. reach to 299.24 million, as per the recent survey report [1] in 2019 this count will reach 2.7 billion and after 3 years, this count will increase up to 442.5 million. This article includes a cluster based progressive smart lock with a dependent combination that is short and more secure in nature. Android provides smart lock facilities with the combination of 9 dot, 6dot, 5dot, 4dot and 1-9 number. By using this mobile phone user will be able to generate pattern lock or number password for authentication. This is a single authentication system, this research paper includes a more secured multiple cluster based pattern match system.

Assertions are helpful in program analysis, such as software testing and verification. The most challenging part of automatically recommending assertions is to design the assertion patterns and to insert assertions in proper locations. In this paper, we develop Weak-Assert, a weakness-oriented assertion recommendation toolkit for program analysis of C code. A weakness-oriented assertion is an assertion which can help to find potential program weaknesses. Weak-Assert uses well-designed patterns to match the abstract syntax trees of source code automatically. It collects significant messages from trees and inserts assertions into proper locations of programs. These assertions can be checked by using program analysis techniques. The experiments are set up on Juliet test suite and several actual projects in Github. Experimental results show that Weak-Assert helps to find 125 program weaknesses in 26 actual projects. These weaknesses are confirmed manually to be triggered by some test cases.

Industrial control systems are the fundamental infrastructures of a country. Since the intrusion attack methods for industrial control systems have become complex and concealed, the traditional protection methods, such as vulnerability database, virus database and rule matching cannot cope with the attacks hidden inside the terminals of industrial control systems. In this work, we propose a control flow anomaly detection algorithm based on the control flow of the business programs. First, a basic group partition method based on key paths is proposed to reduce the performance burden caused by tabbed-assert control flow analysis method through expanding basic research units. Second, the algorithm phases of standard path set acquisition and path matching are introduced. By judging whether the current control flow path is deviating from the standard set or not, the abnormal operating conditions of industrial control can be detected. Finally, the effectiveness of a control flow anomaly detection (checking) algorithm based on Path Matching (CFCPM) is demonstrated by anomaly detection ability analysis and experiments.

Comparing with the traditional Internet, the space-ground integration information network has more complicated topology, wider coverage area and is more difficult to find the source of attacks. In this paper, a cyber attack attribution framework is proposed to trace the attack source in space-ground integration information network. First, we constructs a cyber security knowledge graph for space-ground integration information network. An automated attributing framework for cyber-attack is proposed. It attributes the source of the attack by querying the cyber security knowledge graph we constructed. Experiments show that the proposed framework can attribute network attacks simply, effectively, and automatically.

The aim of the study is to evaluate the consistency of supplier risk assessment performed during the supplier selection process. Existing literature indicates that current supplier selection processes yield inconsistent results. Consistent supplier selection cannot be accomplished without stable risk assessment performed during the process. A case study was conducted in a train manufacturer in South Africa, and document analysis, interviews and questionnaires were employed to source information and data. Triangulation and pattern matching enabled a comparative study between literature and practice from which findings were derived. The study suggests selection criteria that may be considered when performing supplier risk assessment during the selection process. The findings indicate that structured supplier risk assessment with predefined supplier selection criteria may eliminate inconsistencies in supplier assessment and selection.

Web-Based applications are becoming more increasingly technically complex and sophisticated. The very nature of their feature-rich design and their capability to collate, process, and disseminate information over the Internet or from within an intranet makes them a popular target for attack. According to Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) Top Ten Cheat sheet-2017, SQL Injection Attack is at peak among online attacks. This can be attributed primarily to lack of awareness on software security. Developing effective SQL injection detection approaches has been a challenge in spite of extensive research in this area. In this paper, we propose a signature based SQL injection attack detection framework by integrating fingerprinting method and Pattern Matching to distinguish genuine SQL queries from malicious queries. Our framework monitors SQL queries to the database and compares them against a dataset of signatures from known SQL injection attacks. If the fingerprint method cannot determine the legitimacy of query alone, then the Aho Corasick algorithm is invoked to ascertain whether attack signatures appear in the queries. The initial experimental results of our framework indicate the approach can identify wide variety of SQL injection attacks with negligible impact on performance.

Hackers create different types of Malware such as Trojans which they use to steal user-confidential information (e.g. credit card details) with a few simple commands, recent malware however has been created intelligently and in an uncontrolled size, which puts malware analysis as one of the top important subjects of information security. This paper proposes an efficient dynamic malware-detection method based on API similarity. This proposed method outperform the traditional signature-based detection method. The experiment evaluated 197 malware samples and the proposed method showed promising results of correctly identified malware.

There are continuous hacking and social issues regarding APT (Advanced Persistent Threat - APT) attacks and a number of antivirus businesses and researchers are making efforts to analyze such APT attacks in order to prevent or cope with APT attacks, some host PC security technologies such as firewalls and intrusion detection systems are used. Therefore, in this study, malignant behavior patterns were extracted by using an API of PE files. Moreover, the FP-Growth Algorithm to extract behavior information generated in the host PC in order to overcome the limitation of the previous signature-based intrusion detection systems. We will utilize this study as fundamental research about a system that extracts malignant behavior patterns within networks and APIs in the future.

Cybersecurity is one of critical issues in modern military operations. In cyber operations, security professionals depend on various information and security systems to mitigate cyber threats through enhanced cyber situational awareness. Cyber situational awareness can give decision makers mission completeness and providing appropriate timely decision support for proactive response. The crucial information for cyber situational awareness can be collected at network boundaries through deep packet inspection with security systems. Regular expression is regarded as a practical method for deep packet inspection that is considering a next generation intrusion detection and prevention, however, it is not commonly used by the reason of its resource intensive characteristics. In this paper, we describe our effort and achievement on regular expression processing capability in real time and an evaluation method with experimental result.