Biblio

The Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly evolving, while introducing several new challenges regarding security, resilience and operational assurance. In the face of an increasing attack landscape, it is necessary to cater for the provision of efficient mechanisms to collectively detect sophisticated malware resulting in undesirable (run-time) device and network modifications. This is not an easy task considering the dynamic and heterogeneous nature of IoT environments; i.e., different operating systems, varied connected networks and a wide gamut of underlying protocols and devices. Malicious IoT nodes or gateways can potentially lead to the compromise of the whole IoT network infrastructure. On the other hand, the SDN control plane has the capability to be orchestrated towards providing enhanced security services to all layers of the IoT networking stack. In this paper, we propose an SDN-enabled control plane based orchestration that leverages emerging Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) classification models; a Deep Learning (DL) based architecture to combat malicious IoT nodes. It is a first step towards a new line of security mechanisms that enables the provision of scalable AI-based intrusion detection focusing on the operational assurance of only those specific, critical infrastructure components,thus, allowing for a much more efficient security solution. The proposed mechanism has been evaluated with current state of the art datasets (i.e., N\_BaIoT 2018) using standard performance evaluation metrics. Our preliminary results show an outstanding detection accuracy (i.e., 99.9%) which significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches. Based on our findings, we posit open issues and challenges, and discuss possible ways to address them, so that security does not hinder the deployment of intelligent IoT-based computing systems.

With the rapid development of the Industrial Internet, the network security risks faced by industrial control systems (ICSs) are becoming more and more intense. How to do a good job in the security protection of industrial control systems is extremely urgent. For traditional network security, industrial control systems have some unique characteristics, which results in traditional intrusion detection systems that cannot be directly reused on it. Aiming at the industrial control system, this paper constructs all attack paths from the hacker's perspective through the attack tree model, and uses the LSTM algorithm to identify and classify the attack behavior, and then further classify the attack event by extracting atomic actions. Finally, through the constructed attack tree model, the results are reversed and predicted. The results show that the model has a good effect on attack recognition, and can effectively analyze the hacker attack path and predict the next attack target.

Nowadays, with the increasing use of computers and the Internet, more people are exposed to cyber-security dangers. According to antivirus companies, malware is one of the most common threats of using the Internet. Therefore, providing a practical solution is critical. Current methods use machine learning approaches to classify malware samples automatically. Despite the success of these approaches, the accuracy and efficiency of these techniques are still inadequate, especially for multiple class classification problems and imbalanced training data sets. To mitigate this problem, we use deep learning-based algorithms for classification and generation of new malware samples. Our model is based on the opcode sequences, which are given to the model without any pre-processing. Besides, we use a novel generative adversarial network to generate new opcode sequences for oversampling minority classes. Also, we propose the model that is a combination of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) to classify malware samples. CNN is used to consider short-term dependency between features; while, LSTM is used to consider longer-term dependence. The experiment results show our method could classify malware to their corresponding family effectively. Our model achieves 98.99% validation accuracy.

The Software Defined Network (SDN) provides higher programmable functionality for network configuration and management dynamically. Moreover, SDN introduces a centralized management approach by dividing the network into control and data planes. In this paper, we introduce a deep learning enabled intrusion detection and prevention system (DL-IDPS) to prevent secure shell (SSH) brute-force attacks and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks in SDN. The packet length in SDN switch has been collected as a sequence for deep learning models to identify anomalous and malicious packets. Four deep learning models, including Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Stacked Auto-encoder (SAE), are implemented and compared for the proposed DL-IDPS. The experimental results show that the proposed MLP based DL-IDPS has the highest accuracy which can achieve nearly 99% and 100% accuracy to prevent SSH Brute-force and DDoS attacks, respectively.

Network traffic anomaly detection is of critical importance in cybersecurity due to the massive and rapid growth of sophisticated computer network attacks. Indeed, the more new Internet-related technologies are created, the more elaborate the attacks become. Among all the contemporary high-level attacks, dictionary-based brute-force attacks (BFA) present one of the most unsurmountable challenges. We need to develop effective methods to detect and mitigate such brute-force attacks in realtime. In this paper, we investigate SSH and FTP brute-force attack detection by using the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) deep learning approach. Additionally, we made use of machine learning (ML) classifiers: J48, naive Bayes (NB), decision table (DT), random forest (RF) and k-nearest-neighbor (k-NN), for additional detection purposes. We used the well-known labelled dataset CICIDS2017. We evaluated the effectiveness of the LSTM and ML algorithms, and compared their performance. Our results show that the LSTM model outperforms the ML algorithms, with an accuracy of 99.88%.

This paper describes an experimental result of modeling stomp boxes of the distortion effect based on a machine learning approach. Our proposed technique models a distortion stomp box as a neural network consisting of LSTM layers. In this approach, the neural network is employed for learning the nonlinear behavior of the distortion stomp boxes. All the parameters for replicating the distortion sound are estimated through its training process using the input and output signals obtained from some commercial stomp boxes. The experimental result indicates that the proposed technique may have a certain appropriateness to replicate the distortion sound by using the well-trained neural networks.

We leverage deep learning algorithms on various user behavioral information gathered from end-user devices to classify a subject of interest. In spite of the ability of these techniques to counter spoofing threats, they are vulnerable to adversarial learning attacks, where an attacker adds adversarial noise to the input samples to fool the classifier into false acceptance. Recently, a handful of mature techniques like Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM) have been proposed to aid white-box attacks, where an attacker has a complete knowledge of the machine learning model. On the contrary, we exploit a black-box attack to a behavioral biometric system based on gait patterns, by using FGSM and training a shadow model that mimics the target system. The attacker has limited knowledge on the target model and no knowledge of the real user being authenticated, but induces a false acceptance in authentication. Our goal is to understand the feasibility of a black-box attack and to what extent FGSM on shadow models would contribute to its success. Our results manifest that the performance of FGSM highly depends on the quality of the shadow model, which is in turn impacted by key factors including the number of queries allowed by the target system in order to train the shadow model. Our experimentation results have revealed strong relationships between the shadow model and FGSM performance, as well as the effect of the number of FGSM iterations used to create an attack instance. These insights also shed light on deep-learning algorithms' model shareability that can be exploited to launch a successful attack.

We investigate a prediction model using RNN for network intrusion detection in industrial IoT environments. For intrusion detection, we use anomaly detection methods that estimate the next packet, measure and score the distance measurement in real packets to distinguish whether it is a normal packet or an abnormal packet. When the packet was learned in the LSTM model, two-gram and sliding window of N-gram showed the best performance in terms of errors and the performance of the LSTM model was the highest compared with other data mining regression techniques. Finally, cosine similarity was used as a scoring function, and anomaly detection was performed by setting a boundary for cosine similarity that consider as normal packet.

Cross-site scripting (XSS) is one of the main threats of Web applications, which has great harm. How to effectively detect and defend against XSS attacks has become more and more important. Due to the malicious obfuscation of attack codes and the gradual increase in number, the traditional XSS detection methods have some defects such as poor recognition of malicious attack codes, inadequate feature extraction and low efficiency. Therefore, we present a novel approach to detect XSS attacks based on the attention mechanism of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) recurrent neural network. First of all, the data need to be preprocessed, we used decoding technology to restore the XSS codes to the unencoded state for improving the readability of the code, then we used word2vec to extract XSS payload features and map them to feature vectors. And then, we improved the LSTM model by adding attention mechanism, the LSTM-Attention detection model was designed to train and test the data. We used the ability of LSTM model to extract context-related features for deep learning, the added attention mechanism made the model extract more effective features. Finally, we used the classifier to classify the abstract features. Experimental results show that the proposed XSS detection model based on LSTM-Attention achieves a precision rate of 99.3% and a recall rate of 98.2% in the actually collected dataset. Compared with traditional machine learning methods and other deep learning methods, this method can more effectively identify XSS attacks.

Malware refers to any software accessing or being installed in a system without the authorisation of administrators. Various malware has been widely used for cyber-criminals to accomplish their evil intentions and goals. To combat the increasing amount and reduce the threat of malicious programs, a novel deep learning framework, which uses NLP techniques for reference, combines CNN and LSTM neurones to capture the locally spatial correlations and learn from sequential longterm dependency is proposed. Hence, high-level abstractions and representations are automatically extracted for the malware classification task. The classification accuracy improves from 0.81 (best one by Random Forest) to approximately 1.0.

Autonomy in cybersystems depends on their ability to be self-aware by understanding the intent of services and applications that are running on those systems. In case of mission-critical cybersystems that are deployed in dynamic and unpredictable environments, the newly integrated unknown applications or services can either be benign and essential for the mission or they can be cyberattacks. In some cases, these cyberattacks are evasive Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) where the attackers remain undetected for reconnaissance in order to ascertain system features for an attack e.g. Trojan Laziok. In other cases, the attackers can use the system only for computing e.g. cryptomining malware. APTs such as cryptomining malware neither disrupt normal system functionalities nor trigger any warning signs because they simply perform bitwise and cryptographic operations as any other benign compression or encoding application. Thus, it is difficult for defense mechanisms such as antivirus applications to detect these attacks. In this paper, we propose an Operating Context profiling system based on deep neural networks-Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks-using Windows Performance Counters data for detecting these evasive cryptomining applications. In addition, we propose Deep Cryptomining Profiler (DeCrypto Pro), a detection system with a novel model selection framework containing a utility function that can select a classification model for behavior profiling from both the light-weight machine learning models (Random Forest and k-Nearest Neighbors) and a deep learning model (LSTM), depending on available computing resources. Given data from performance counters, we show that individual models perform with high accuracy and can be trained with limited training data. We also show that the DeCrypto Profiler framework reduces the use of computational resources and accurately detects cryptomining applications by selecting an appropriate model, given the constraints such as data sample size and system configuration.

Malicious scripts are an important computer infection threat vector for computer users. For internet-scale processing, static analysis offers substantial computing efficiencies. We propose the ScriptNet system for neural malicious JavaScript detection which is based on static analysis. We also propose a novel deep learning model, Pre-Informant Learning (PIL), which processes Javascript files as byte sequences. Lower layers capture the sequential nature of these byte sequences while higher layers classify the resulting embedding as malicious or benign. Unlike previously proposed solutions, our model variants are trained in an end-to-end fashion allowing discriminative training even for the sequential processing layers. Evaluating this model on a large corpus of 212,408 JavaScript files indicates that the best performing PIL model offers a 98.10% true positive rate (TPR) for the first 60K byte subsequences and 81.66% for the full-length files, at a false positive rate (FPR) of 0.50%. Both models significantly outperform several baseline models. The best performing PIL model can successfully detect 92.02% of unknown malware samples in a hindsight experiment where the true labels of the malicious JavaScript files were not known when the model was trained.

Smart cities comprise multiple critical infrastructures, two of which are the power grid and communication networks, backed by centralized data analytics and storage. To effectively model the interdependencies between these infrastructures and enable a greater understanding of how communities respond to and impact them, large amounts of varied, real-world data on residential and commercial consumer energy consumption, load patterns, and associated human behavioral impacts are required. The dissemination of such data to the research communities is, however, largely restricted because of security and privacy concerns. This paper creates an opportunity for the development and dissemination of synthetic energy consumption data which is inherently anonymous but holds similarities to the properties of real data. This paper explores a framework using mixture density network (MDN) model integrated with a multi-layered Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network which shows promise in this area of research. The model is trained using an initial sample recorded from residential smart meters in the state of Florida, and is used to generate fully synthetic energy consumption data. The synthesized data will be made publicly available for interested users.

Network communication data are high-dimensional and spatiotemporal, and their information content is often degraded by common traffic analysis methods. For long-term network attack detection based on network flows, it is important to extract a discriminative, high-dimensional intrinsic representation of such flows. This work focuses on a hybrid deep neural network design using a combination of a convolutional neural network (CNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM) with graph similarity measures to learn high-dimensional representations from the network traffic. In particular, examining a set of network flows, we commence by constructing a temporal communication graph and then computing graph kernel matrices. Having obtained the kernel matrices, for each graph, we use the kernel value between graphs and calculate graph characterization vectors by graph signal processing. This vector can be regarded as a kernel-based similarity embedding vector of the graph that integrates structural similarity information and leverages efficient graph kernel using the graph Laplacian matrix. Our approach exploits graph structures as the additional prior information, the graph Laplacian matrix for feature extraction and hybrid deep learning models for long-term information learning on communication graphs. Experiments on two real-world network attack datasets show that our approach can extract more discriminative representations, leading to an improved accuracy in a supervised classification task. The experimental results show that our method increases the overall accuracy by approximately 10%-15%.

Natural language processing (NLP) have been recently used to extract clinical information from free text in Electronic Health Record (EHR). In clinical NLP one challenge is that the meaning of clinical entities is heavily affected by assertion modifiers such as negation, uncertain, hypothetical, experiencer and so on. Incorrect assertion assignment could cause inaccurate diagnosis of patients' condition or negatively influence following study like disease modeling. Thus, clinical NLP systems which can detect assertion status of given target medical findings (e.g. disease, symptom) in clinical context are highly demanded. Here in this work, we propose a deep-learning system based on word embedding, RNN and attention mechanism (more specifically: Attention-based Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory networks) for assertion detection in clinical notes. Unlike previous state-of-art methods which require knowledge input or feature engineering, our system is a knowledge poor machine learning system and can be easily extended or transferred to other domains. The evaluation of our system on public benchmarking corpora demonstrates that a knowledge poor deep-learning system can also achieve high performance for detecting negation and assertions comparing to state-of-the-art systems.

In this paper, we introduce a sequential autoencoder framework using long short term memory (LSTM) neural network for computer network intrusion detection. We exploit the dimensionality reduction and feature extraction property of the autoencoder framework to efficiently carry out the reconstruction process. Furthermore, we use the LSTM networks to handle the sequential nature of the computer network data. We assign a threshold value based on cross-validation in order to classify whether the incoming network data sequence is anomalous or not. Moreover, the proposed framework can work on both fixed and variable length data sequence and works efficiently for unforeseen and unpredictable network attacks. We then also use the unsupervised version of the LSTM, GRU, Bi-LSTM and Neural Networks. Through a comprehensive set of experiments, we demonstrate that our proposed sequential intrusion detection framework performs well and is dynamic, robust and scalable.

Due to the massive amount of the network traffic, attackers have a great chance to cause a huge damage to the network system or its users. Intrusion detection plays an important role in ensuring security for the system by detecting the attacks and the malicious activities. In this paper, we utilize CIDDS dataset and apply a deep learning approach, Long-Short-Term Memory (LSTM), to implement intrusion detection system. This research achieves a reasonable accuracy of 0.85.

A robust and reliable system of detecting spam reviews is a crying need in todays world in order to purchase products without being cheated from online sites. In many online sites, there are options for posting reviews, and thus creating scopes for fake paid reviews or untruthful reviews. These concocted reviews can mislead the general public and put them in a perplexity whether to believe the review or not. Prominent machine learning techniques have been introduced to solve the problem of spam review detection. The majority of current research has concentrated on supervised learning methods, which require labeled data - an inadequacy when it comes to online review. Our focus in this article is to detect any deceptive text reviews. In order to achieve that we have worked with both labeled and unlabeled data and proposed deep learning methods for spam review detection which includes Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and a variant of Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) that is Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM). We have also applied some traditional machine learning classifiers such as Nave Bayes (NB), K Nearest Neighbor (KNN) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) to detect spam reviews and finally, we have shown the performance comparison for both traditional and deep learning classifiers.

The Internet has gradually penetrated into the national economy, politics, culture, military, education and other fields. Due to its openness, interconnectivity and other characteristics, the Internet is vulnerable to all kinds of malicious attacks. The research uses a honeynet to collect attacker information, and proposes a network penetration recognition technology based on interactive behavior analysis. Using Sebek technology to capture the attacker's keystroke record, time series modeling of the keystroke sequences of the interaction behavior is proposed, using a Recurrent Neural Network. The attack recognition method is constructed by using Long Short-Term Memory that solves the problem of gradient disappearance, gradient explosion and long-term memory shortage in ordinary Recurrent Neural Network. Finally, the experiment verifies that the short-short time memory network has a high accuracy rate for the recognition of penetration attacks.

Controllers of security-critical cyber-physical systems, like the power grid, are a very important class of computer systems. Attacks against the control code of a power-grid system, especially zero-day attacks, can be catastrophic. Earlier detection of the anomalies can prevent further damage. However, detecting zero-day attacks is extremely challenging because they have no known code and have unknown behavior. Furthermore, if data collected from the controller is transferred to a server through networks for analysis and detection of anomalous behavior, this creates a very large attack surface and also delays detection. In order to address this problem, we propose Reconstruction Error Distribution (RED) of Hardware Performance Counters (HPCs), and a data-driven defense system based on it. Specifically, we first train a temporal deep learning model, using only normal HPC readings from legitimate processes that run daily in these power-grid systems, to model the normal behavior of the power-grid controller. Then, we run this model using real-time data from commonly available HPCs. We use the proposed RED to enhance the temporal deep learning detection of anomalous behavior, by estimating distribution deviations from the normal behavior with an effective statistical test. Experimental results on a real power-grid controller show that we can detect anomalous behavior with high accuracy (\textbackslashtextgreater99.9%), nearly zero false positives and short (\textbackslashtextless; 360ms) latency.

Ransomware, as a specialized form of malicious software, has recently emerged as a major threat in computer security. With an ability to lock out user access to their content, recent ransomware attacks have caused severe impact at an individual and organizational level. While research in malware detection can be adapted directly for ransomware, specific structural properties of ransomware can further improve the quality of detection. In this paper, we adapt the deep learning methods used in malware detection for detecting ransomware from emulation sequences. We present specialized recurrent neural networks for capturing local event patterns in ransomware sequences using the concept of attention mechanisms. We demonstrate the performance of enhanced LSTM models on a sequence dataset derived by the emulation of ransomware executables targeting the Windows environment.

The development of Human Action Recognition (HAR) system is getting popular. This project developed a HAR system for the application in the surveillance system to minimize the man-power for providing security to the citizens such as public safety and crime prevention. In this research, deep learning network using Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) with Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) are used to analyze dynamic video motion of sport actions and classify different types of actions and their performance. It could classify different types of human motion with a small number of video frame for efficiency and memory saving. The current accuracy achieved is up to 92.9% but with high potential of further improvement.

Web attacks have increased rapidly in recent years. However, traditional methods are useless to track web attackers. Browser fingerprint, as a stateless tracking technique, can be used to solve this problem. Given browser fingerprint changes easily and frequently, it is easy to lose track. Therefore, we need to improve the stability of browser fingerprint by linking the new one to the previous chain. In this paper, we propose LSTM model to learn the potential relationship of browser fingerprint evolution. In addition, we adjust the input feature vector to time series and construct training set to train the model. The results show that our model can construct the tracking chain perfectly well with average ownership up to 99.3%.

Nowadays, Cross Site Scripting (XSS) is one of the major threats to Web applications. Since it's known to the public, XSS vulnerability has been in the TOP 10 Web application vulnerabilities based on surveys published by the Open Web Applications Security Project (OWASP). How to effectively detect and defend XSS attacks are still one of the most important security issues. In this paper, we present a novel approach to detect XSS attacks based on deep learning (called DeepXSS). First of all, we used word2vec to extract the feature of XSS payloads which captures word order information and map each payload to a feature vector. And then, we trained and tested the detection model using Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) recurrent neural networks. Experimental results show that the proposed XSS detection model based on deep learning achieves a precision rate of 99.5% and a recall rate of 97.9% in real dataset, which means that the novel approach can effectively identify XSS attacks.