AI Solutions for MDS: Artificial Intelligence Techniques for Misuse Detection and Localisation in Telecommunication Environments

This report considers the application of Articial Intelligence (AI) techniques to the problem of misuse detection and misuse localisation within telecommunications environments. A broad survey of techniques is provided, that covers inter alia rule based systems, model-based systems, case based reasoning, pattern matching, clustering and feature extraction, articial neural networks, genetic algorithms, arti cial immune systems, agent based systems, data mining and a variety of hybrid approaches. The report then considers the central issue of event correlation, that is at the heart of many misuse detection and localisation systems. The notion of being able to infer misuse by the correlation of individual temporally distributed events within a multiple data stream environment is explored, and a range of techniques, covering model based approaches, `programmed' AI and machine learning paradigms. It is found that, in general, correlation is best achieved via rule based approaches, but that these suffer from a number of drawbacks, such as the difculty of developing and maintaining an appropriate knowledge base, and the lack of ability to generalise from known misuses to new unseen misuses. Two distinct approaches are evident. One attempts to encode knowledge of known misuses, typically within rules, and use this to screen events. This approach cannot generally detect misuses for which it has not been programmed, i.e. it is prone to issuing false negatives. The other attempts to `learn' the features of event patterns that constitute normal behaviour, and, by observing patterns that do not match expected behaviour, detect when a misuse has occurred. This approach is prone to issuing false positives, i.e. inferring misuse from innocent patterns of behaviour that the system was not trained to recognise. Contemporary approaches are seen to favour hybridisation, often combining detection or localisation mechanisms for both abnormal and normal behaviour, the former to capture known cases of misuse, the latter to capture unknown cases. In some systems, these mechanisms even work together to update each other to increase detection rates and lower false positive rates. It is concluded that hybridisation offers the most promising future direction, but that a rule or state based component is likely to remain, being the most natural approach to the correlation of complex events. The challenge, then, is to mitigate the weaknesses of canonical programmed systems such that learning, generalisation and adaptation are more readily facilitated

Autoencoders: A Low Cost Anomaly Detection Method for Computer Network Data Streams

Computer networks are vulnerable to cyber attacks that can affect the confidentiality, integrity and availability of mission critical data. Intrusion detection methods can be employed to detect these attacks in real-time. Anomaly detection offers the advantage of detecting unknown attacks in a semi-supervised fashion. This paper aims to answer the question if autoencoders, a type of semisupervised feedforward neural network, can provide a low cost anomaly detector method for computer network data streams. Autoencoder methods were evaluated online with the KDD’99 and UNSW-NB15 data sets, demonstrating that running time and labeling cost are significantly reduced compared to traditional online classification techniques for similar detection performance. Further research would consider the trade-off between single vs stacked networks, multi-label classification, concept drift detection and active learning

Machine learning approach for detection of nonTor traffic

Intrusion detection has attracted a considerable interest from researchers and industry. After many years of research the community still faces the problem of building reliable and efficient intrusion detection systems (IDS) capable of handling large quantities of data with changing patterns in real time situations. The Tor network is popular in providing privacy and security to end user by anonymizing the identity of internet users connecting through a series of tunnels and nodes. This work identifies two problems; classification of Tor traffic and nonTor traffic to expose the activities within Tor traffic that minimizes the protection of users in using the UNB-CIC Tor Network Traffic dataset and classification of the Tor traffic flow in the network. This paper proposes a hybrid classifier; Artificial Neural Network in conjunction with Correlation feature selection algorithm for dimensionality reduction and improved classification performance. The reliability and efficiency of the propose hybrid classifier is compared with Support Vector Machine and naïve Bayes classifiers in detecting nonTor traffic in UNB-CIC Tor Network Traffic dataset. Experimental results show the hybrid classifier, ANN-CFS proved a better classifier in detecting nonTor traffic and classifying the Tor traffic flow in UNB-CIC Tor Network Traffic dataset

A cognitive based Intrusion detection system

Intrusion detection is one of the primary mechanisms to provide computer networks with security. With an increase in attacks and growing dependence on various fields such as medicine, commercial, and engineering to give services over a network, securing networks have become a significant issue. The purpose of Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) is to make models which can recognize regular communications from abnormal ones and take necessary actions. Among different methods in this field, Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) have been widely used. However, ANN-based IDS, has two main disadvantages: 1- Low detection precision. 2- Weak detection stability. To overcome these issues, this paper proposes a new approach based on Deep Neural Network (DNN. The general mechanism of our model is as follows: first, some of the data in dataset is properly ranked, afterwards, dataset is normalized with Min-Max normalizer to fit in the limited domain. Then dimensionality reduction is applied to decrease the amount of both useless dimensions and computational cost. After the preprocessing part, Mean-Shift clustering algorithm is the used to create different subsets and reduce the complexity of dataset. Based on each subset, two models are trained by Support Vector Machine (SVM) and deep learning method. Between two models for each subset, the model with a higher accuracy is chosen. This idea is inspired from philosophy of divide and conquer. Hence, the DNN can learn each subset quickly and robustly. Finally, to reduce the error from the previous step, an ANN model is trained to gain and use the results in order to be able to predict the attacks. We can reach to 95.4 percent of accuracy. Possessing a simple structure and less number of tunable parameters, the proposed model still has a grand generalization with a high level of accuracy in compared to other methods such as SVM, Bayes network, and STL.Comment: 18 pages, 6 figure

Time is of the Essence: Machine Learning-based Intrusion Detection in Industrial Time Series Data

The Industrial Internet of Things drastically increases connectivity of devices in industrial applications. In addition to the benefits in efficiency, scalability and ease of use, this creates novel attack surfaces. Historically, industrial networks and protocols do not contain means of security, such as authentication and encryption, that are made necessary by this development. Thus, industrial IT-security is needed. In this work, emulated industrial network data is transformed into a time series and analysed with three different algorithms. The data contains labeled attacks, so the performance can be evaluated. Matrix Profiles perform well with almost no parameterisation needed. Seasonal Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average performs well in the presence of noise, requiring parameterisation effort. Long Short Term Memory-based neural networks perform mediocre while requiring a high training- and parameterisation effort.Comment: Extended version of a publication in the 2018 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining Workshops (ICDMW