Biblio

The fast growth of encrypted traffic puts forward burning requirements on the efficiency of traffic classification. Although deep learning models perform well in the classification, they sacrifice the efficiency to obtain high-precision results. To reduce the resource and time consumption, a novel and lightweight model is proposed in this paper. Our design principle is to “maximize the reuse of thin modules”. A thin module adopts the multi-head attention and the 1D convolutional network. Attributed to the one-step interaction of all packets and the parallelized computation of the multi-head attention mechanism, a key advantage of our model is that the number of parameters and running time are significantly reduced. In addition, the effectiveness and efficiency of 1D convolutional networks are proved in traffic classification. Besides, the proposed model can work well in a real time manner, since only three consecutive packets of a flow are needed. To improve the stability of the model, the designed network is trained with the aid of ResNet, layer normalization and learning rate warmup. The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art works based on deep learning on two public datasets. The results show that our model has higher accuracy and running efficiency, while the number of parameters used is 1.8% of the 1D convolutional network and the training time halves.

In the last couple of years, the move to cyberspace provides a fertile environment for ransomware criminals like ever before. Notably, since the introduction of WannaCry, numerous ransomware detection solution has been proposed. However, the ransomware incidence report shows that most organizations impacted by ransomware are running state of the art ransomware detection tools. Hence, an alternative solution is an urgent requirement as the existing detection models are not sufficient to spot emerging ransomware treat. With this motivation, our work proposes "DeepGuard," a novel concept of modeling user behavior for ransomware detection. The main idea is to log the file-interaction pattern of typical user activity and pass it through deep generative autoencoder architecture to recreate the input. With sufficient training data, the model can learn how to reconstruct typical user activity (or input) with minimal reconstruction error. Hence, by applying the three-sigma limit rule on the model's output, DeepGuard can distinguish the ransomware activity from the user activity. The experiment result shows that DeepGuard effectively detects a variant class of ransomware with minimal false-positive rates. Overall, modeling the attack detection with user-behavior permits the proposed strategy to have deep visibility of various ransomware families.

In this study, it was aimed to recognize the emotional state from facial images using the deep learning method. In the study, which was approved by the ethics committee, a custom data set was created using videos taken from 20 male and 20 female participants while simulating 7 different facial expressions (happy, sad, surprised, angry, disgusted, scared, and neutral). Firstly, obtained videos were divided into image frames, and then face images were segmented using the Haar library from image frames. The size of the custom data set obtained after the image preprocessing is more than 25 thousand images. The proposed convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture which is mimics of LeNet architecture has been trained with this custom dataset. According to the proposed CNN architecture experiment results, the training loss was found as 0.0115, the training accuracy was found as 99.62%, the validation loss was 0.0109, and the validation accuracy was 99.71%.

As a part of body language, facial expression is a psychological state that reflects the current emotional state of the person. Recognition of facial expressions can help to understand others and enhance communication with others. We propose a facial expression recognition method based on convolutional neural network ensemble learning in this paper. Our model is composed of three sub-networks, and uses the SVM classifier to Integrate the output of the three networks to get the final result. The recognition accuracy of the model's expression on the FER2013 dataset reached 71.27%. The results show that the method has high test accuracy and short prediction time, and can realize real-time, high-performance facial recognition.

For the purpose of outdoor advertising market researching, AD images are recaptured and uploaded everyday for statistics. But the quality of the recaptured advertising images are often affected by conditions such as angle, distance, and light during the shooting process, which consequently reduce either the speed or the accuracy of the retrieving algorithm. In this paper, we proposed a hash retrieval method based on convolutional neural networks for recaptured images. The basic idea is to add a hash layer to the convolutional neural network and then extract the binary hash code output by the hash layer to perform image retrieval in lowdimensional Hamming space. Experimental results show that the retrieval performance is improved compared with the current commonly used hash retrieval methods.

Image Retrieval (IR) has become one of the main problems facing computer society recently. To increase computing similarities between images, hashing approaches have become the focus of many programmers. Indeed, in the past few years, Deep Learning (DL) has been considered as a backbone for image analysis using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). This paper aims to design and implement a high-performance image classifier that can be used in several applications such as intelligent vehicles, face recognition, marketing, and many others. This work considers experimentation to find the sequential model's best configuration for classifying images. The best performance has been obtained from two layers' architecture; the first layer consists of 128 nodes, and the second layer is composed of 32 nodes, where the accuracy reached up to 0.9012. The proposed classifier has been achieved using CNN and the data extracted from the CIFAR-10 dataset by the inception model, which are called the Transfer Values (TRVs). Indeed, the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm is used to reduce the TRVs. In this respect, the work focus is to reduce the TRVs to obtain high-performance image classifier models. Indeed, the PSO algorithm has been enhanced by using the crossover technique from genetic algorithms. This led to a reduction of the complexity of models in terms of the number of parameters used and the execution time.

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.

Machine learning techniques help to understand underlying patterns in datasets to develop defense mechanisms against cyber attacks. Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) technique is a machine learning technique used in detecting attack vs. benign data. However, it is difficult to construct any effective model when there are imbalances in the dataset that prevent proper classification of attack samples in data. In this research, we use UGR'16 dataset to conduct data wrangling initially. This technique helps to prepare a test set from the original dataset to train the neural network model effectively. We experimented with a series of inputs of varying sizes (i.e. 10000, 50000, 1 million) to observe the performance of the MLP neural network model with distribution of features over accuracy. Later, we use Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) model that produces samples of different attack labels (e.g. blacklist, anomaly spam, ssh scan) for balancing the dataset. These samples are generated based on data from the UGR'16 dataset. Further experiments with MLP neural network model shows that a balanced attack sample dataset, made possible with GAN, produces more accurate results than an imbalanced one.

With the increasing scale of network, attacks against network emerge one after another, and security problems become increasingly prominent. Network intrusion detection system is a widely used and effective security means at present. In addition, with the development of machine learning technology, various intelligent intrusion detection algorithms also start to sprout. By flexibly combining these intelligent methods with intrusion detection technology, the comprehensive performance of intrusion detection can be improved, but the vulnerability of machine learning model in the adversarial environment can not be ignored. In this paper, we study the defense problem of network intrusion detection system against adversarial samples. More specifically, we design a defense algorithm for NIDS against adversarial samples by using bidirectional generative adversarial network. The generator learns the data distribution of normal samples during training, which is an implicit model reflecting the normal data distribution. After training, the adversarial sample detection module calculates the reconstruction error and the discriminator matching error of sample. Then, the adversarial samples are removed, which improves the robustness and accuracy of NIDS in the adversarial environment.

Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) and its variants have shown promising results in generating synthetic data. However, the issues with GANs are: (i) the learning happens around the training samples and the model often ends up remembering them, consequently, compromising the privacy of individual samples - this becomes a major concern when GANs are applied to training data including personally identifiable information, (ii) the randomness in generated data - there is no control over the specificity of generated samples. To address these issues, we propose imdpGAN-an information maximizing differentially private Generative Adversarial Network. It is an end-to-end framework that simultaneously achieves privacy protection and learns latent representations. With experiments on MNIST dataset, we show that imdpGAN preserves the privacy of the individual data point, and learns latent codes to control the specificity of the generated samples. We perform binary classification on digit pairs to show the utility versus privacy trade-off. The classification accuracy decreases as we increase privacy levels in the framework. We also experimentally show that the training process of imdpGAN is stable but experience a 10-fold time increase as compared with other GAN frameworks. Finally, we extend imdpGAN framework to CelebA dataset to show how the privacy and learned representations can be used to control the specificity of the output.

Intrusion Detection systems are important tools in preventing malicious traffic from penetrating into networks and systems. Recently, Intrusion Detection Systems are rapidly enhancing their detection capabilities using machine learning algorithms. However, these algorithms are vulnerable to new unknown types of attacks that can evade machine learning IDS. In particular, they may be vulnerable to attacks based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN). GANs have been widely used in domains such as image processing, natural language processing to generate adversarial data of different types such as graphics, videos, texts, etc. We propose a model using GAN to generate adversarial DDoS attacks that can change the attack profile and can be undetected. Our simulation results indicate that by continuous changing of attack profile, defensive systems that use incremental learning will still be vulnerable to new attacks.

Modern industrial control systems (ICS) act as victims of cyber attacks more often in last years. These cyber attacks often can not be detected by classical information security methods. Moreover, the consequences of cyber attack's impact can be catastrophic. Since cyber attacks leads to appearance of anomalies in the ICS and technological equipment controlled by it, the task of intrusion detection for ICS can be reformulated as the task of industrial process anomaly detection. This paper considers the applicability of generative adversarial networks (GANs) in the field of industrial processes anomaly detection. Existing approaches for GANs usage in the field of information security (such as anomaly detection in network traffic) were described. It is proposed to use the BiGAN architecture in order to detect anomalies in the industrial processes. The proposed approach has been tested on Secure Water Treatment Dataset (SWaT). The obtained results indicate the prospects of using the examined method in practice.

Hyperbox classifier is an efficient tool for modern pattern classification problems due to its transparency and rigorous use of Euclidian geometry. Fuzzy min-max (FMM) network efficiently implements the hyperbox classifier, and has been modified several times to yield better classification accuracy. However, the obtained accuracy is not up to the mark. Therefore, in this paper, a new improved FMM (IFMM) network is proposed to increase the accuracy rate. In the proposed IFMM network, a modified constraint is employed to check the expandability of a hyperbox. It also uses semiperimeter of the hyperbox along with k-nearest mechanism to select the expandable hyperbox. In the proposed IFMM, the contraction rules of conventional FMM and enhanced FMM (EFMM) are also modified using semiperimeter of a hyperbox in order to balance the size of both overlapped hyperboxes. Experimental results show that the proposed IFMM network outperforms the FMM, k-nearest FMM, and EFMM by yielding more accuracy rate with less number of hyperboxes. The proposed methods are also applied to histopathological images to know the best magnification factor for classification.

Deep Learning methods have not only shown to improve software performance in compiler heuristics, but also e.g. to improve security in vulnerability prediction or to boost developer productivity in software engineering tools. A key to the success of such methods across these use cases is the expressiveness of the representation used to abstract from the program code. Recent work has shown that different such representations have unique advantages in terms of performance. However, determining the best-performing one for a given task is often not obvious and requires empirical evaluation. Therefore, we present ComPy-Learn, a toolbox for conveniently defining, extracting, and exploring representations of program code. With syntax-level language information from the Clang compiler frontend and low-level information from the LLVM compiler backend, the tool supports the construction of linear and graph representations and enables an efficient search for the best-performing representation and model for tasks on program code.

Millimeter Wave (mmWave) band can be a solution to serve the vast number of Internet of Things (IoT) and Vehicle to Everything (V2X) devices. In this context, Cognitive Radio (CR) is capable of managing the mmWave spectrum sharing efficiently. However, Cognitive mmWave Radios are vulnerable to malicious users due to the complex dynamic radio environment and the shared access medium. This indicates the necessity to implement techniques able to detect precisely any anomalous behaviour in the spectrum to build secure and efficient radios. In this work, we propose a comparison framework between deep generative models: Conditional Generative Adversarial Network (C-GAN), Auxiliary Classifier Generative Adversarial Network (AC-GAN), and Variational Auto Encoder (VAE) used to detect anomalies inside the dynamic radio spectrum. For the sake of the evaluation, a real mmWave dataset is used, and results show that all of the models achieve high probability in detecting spectrum anomalies. Especially, AC-GAN that outperforms C-GAN and VAE in terms of accuracy and probability of detection.

Artificial neural networks allow the identification of black-box models. This paper proposes a method aimed at replicating the static and dynamic behavior of a DC-DC power converter based on a recurrent nonlinear autoregressive exogenous neural network. The method proposed in this work applies an algorithm that trains a neural network based on the inputs and outputs (currents and voltages) of a Buck converter. The approach is validated by means of simulated data of a realistic nonsynchronous Buck converter model programmed in Simulink and by means of experimental results. The predictions made by the neural network are compared to the actual outputs of the system, to determine the accuracy of the method, thus validating the proposed approach. Both simulation and experimental results show the feasibility and accuracy of the proposed black-box approach.

Although deep convolutional neural network (CNN) performs well in many computer vision tasks, its classification mechanism is very vulnerable when it is exposed to the perturbation of adversarial attacks. In this paper, we proposed a new algorithm to generate the substitute model of black-box CNN models by using knowledge distillation. The proposed algorithm distills multiple CNN teacher models to a compact student model as the substitution of other black-box CNN models to be attacked. The black-box adversarial samples can be consequently generated on this substitute model by using various white-box attacking methods. According to our experiments on ResNet18 and DenseNet121, our algorithm boosts the attacking success rate (ASR) by 20% by training the substitute model based on knowledge distillation.

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.

Phishing attacks are the most common form of attacks that can happen over the internet. This method involves attackers attempting to collect data of a user without his/her consent through emails, URLs, and any other link that leads to a deceptive page where a user is persuaded to commit specific actions that can lead to the successful completion of an attack. These attacks can allow an attacker to collect vital information of the user that can often allow the attacker to impersonate the victim and get things done that only the victim should have been able to do, such as carry out transactions, or message someone else, or simply accessing the victim's data. Many studies have been carried out to discuss possible approaches to prevent such attacks. This research work includes three machine learning algorithms to predict any websites' phishing status. In the experimentation these models are trained using URL based features and attempted to prevent Zero-Day attacks by using proposed software proposal that differentiates the legitimate websites and phishing websites by analyzing the website's URL. From observations, the random forest classifier performed with a precision of 97%, a recall 99%, and F1 Score is 97%. Proposed model is fast and efficient as it only works based on the URL and it does not use other resources for analysis, as was the case for past studies.

It is now possible to synthesize highly realistic images of people who do not exist. Such content has, for example, been implicated in the creation of fraudulent socialmedia profiles responsible for dis-information campaigns. Significant efforts are, therefore, being deployed to detect synthetically-generated content. One popular forensic approach trains a neural network to distinguish real from synthetic content.We show that such forensic classifiers are vulnerable to a range of attacks that reduce the classifier to near- 0% accuracy. We develop five attack case studies on a state- of-the-art classifier that achieves an area under the ROC curve (AUC) of 0.95 on almost all existing image generators, when only trained on one generator. With full access to the classifier, we can flip the lowest bit of each pixel in an image to reduce the classifier's AUC to 0.0005; perturb 1% of the image area to reduce the classifier's AUC to 0.08; or add a single noise pattern in the synthesizer's latent space to reduce the classifier's AUC to 0.17. We also develop a black-box attack that, with no access to the target classifier, reduces the AUC to 0.22. These attacks reveal significant vulnerabilities of certain image-forensic classifiers.

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.

In Machine Learning, White Box Adversarial Attacks rely on knowing underlying knowledge about the model attributes. This works focuses on discovering to distrinct pieces of model information: the underlying architecture and primary training dataset. With the process in this paper, a structured set of input probes and the output of the model become the training data for a deep classifier. Two subdomains in Machine Learning are explored - image based classifiers and text transformers with GPT-2. With image classification, the focus is on exploring commonly deployed architectures and datasets available in popular public libraries. Using a single transformer architecture with multiple levels of parameters, text generation is explored by fine tuning off different datasets. Each dataset explored in image and text are distinguishable from one another. Diversity in text transformer outputs implies further research is needed to successfully classify architecture attribution in text domain.

We use potential fields tuned by genetic algorithms to dynamically reconFigure unmanned aerial vehicles networks to serve user bandwidth needs. Such flying network base stations have applications in the many domains needing quick temporary networked communications capabilities such as search and rescue in remote areas and security and defense in overwatch and scouting. Starting with an initial deployment that covers an area and discovers how users are distributed across this area of interest, tuned potential fields specify subsequent movement. A genetic algorithm tunes potential field parameters to reposition UAVs to create and maintain a mesh network that maximizes user bandwidth coverage and network lifetime. Results show that our evolutionary adaptive network deployment algorithm outperforms the current state of the art by better repositioning the unmanned aerial vehicles to provide longer coverage lifetimes while serving bandwidth requirements. The parameters found by the genetic algorithm on four training scenarios with different user distributions lead to better performance than achieved by the state of the art. Furthermore, these parameters also lead to superior performance in three never before seen scenarios indicating that our algorithm finds parameter values that generalize to new scenarios with different user distributions.

With the advent of networking technologies and increasing network attacks, Intrusion Detection systems are apparently needed to stop attacks and malicious activities. Various frameworks and techniques have been developed to solve the problem of intrusion detection, still there is need for new frameworks as per the challenging scenario of enormous scale in data size and nature of attacks. Current IDS systems pose challenges on the throughput to work with high speed networks. In this paper we address the issue of high computational overhead of anomaly based IDS and propose the solution using discretization as a data preprocessing step which can drastically reduce the computation overhead. We propose method to provide near real time detection of attacks using only basic flow level features that can easily be extracted from network packets.

The widespread application of 5G will make intrusion detection of large-scale network traffic a mere need. However, traditional intrusion detection cannot meet the requirements by manually extracting features, and the existing AI methods are also relatively inefficient. Therefore, when performing intrusion detection tasks, they have significant disadvantages of high false alarm rates and low recognition performance. For this challenge, this paper proposes a novel hybrid network, RULA-IDS, which can perform intrusion detection tasks by great amount statistical data from the network monitoring system. RULA-IDS consists of the fully connected layer, the feature extraction layer, the global attention mechanism layer and the SVM classification layer. In the feature extraction layer, the residual U-Net and LSTM are used to extract the spatial and temporal features of the network traffic attributes. It is worth noting that we modified the structure of U-Net to suit the intrusion detection task. The global attention mechanism layer is then used to selectively retain important information from a large number of features and focus on those. Finally, the SVM is used as a classifier to output results. The experimental results show that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art intrusion detection methods, and the accuracies of training and testing are improved to 97.01% and 98.19%, respectively, and presents stronger robustness during training and testing.