Distributed Anomaly Detection using Autoencoder Neural Networks in WSN for IoT

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are fundamental to the Internet of Things (IoT) by bridging the gap between the physical and the cyber worlds. Anomaly detection is a critical task in this context as it is responsible for identifying various events of interests such as equipment faults and undiscovered phenomena. However, this task is challenging because of the elusive nature of anomalies and the volatility of the ambient environments. In a resource-scarce setting like WSN, this challenge is further elevated and weakens the suitability of many existing solutions. In this paper, for the first time, we introduce autoencoder neural networks into WSN to solve the anomaly detection problem. We design a two-part algorithm that resides on sensors and the IoT cloud respectively, such that (i) anomalies can be detected at sensors in a fully distributed manner without the need for communicating with any other sensors or the cloud, and (ii) the relatively more computation-intensive learning task can be handled by the cloud with a much lower (and configurable) frequency. In addition to the minimal communication overhead, the computational load on sensors is also very low (of polynomial complexity) and readily affordable by most COTS sensors. Using a real WSN indoor testbed and sensor data collected over 4 consecutive months, we demonstrate via experiments that our proposed autoencoder-based anomaly detection mechanism achieves high detection accuracy and low false alarm rate. It is also able to adapt to unforeseeable and new changes in a non-stationary environment, thanks to the unsupervised learning feature of our chosen autoencoder neural networks.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figures, IEEE ICC 201

Comprehensive Security Framework for Global Threats Analysis

Cyber criminality activities are changing and becoming more and more professional. With the growth of financial flows through the Internet and the Information System (IS), new kinds of thread arise involving complex scenarios spread within multiple IS components. The IS information modeling and Behavioral Analysis are becoming new solutions to normalize the IS information and counter these new threads. This paper presents a framework which details the principal and necessary steps for monitoring an IS. We present the architecture of the framework, i.e. an ontology of activities carried out within an IS to model security information and User Behavioral analysis. The results of the performed experiments on real data show that the modeling is effective to reduce the amount of events by 91%. The User Behavioral Analysis on uniform modeled data is also effective, detecting more than 80% of legitimate actions of attack scenarios

A deep reinforcement learning based homeostatic system for unmanned position control

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has been proven to be capable of designing an optimal control theory by minimising the error in dynamic systems. However, in many of the real-world operations, the exact behaviour of the environment is unknown. In such environments, random changes cause the system to reach different states for the same action. Hence, application of DRL for unpredictable environments is difficult as the states of the world cannot be known for non-stationary transition and reward functions. In this paper, a mechanism to encapsulate the randomness of the environment is suggested using a novel bio-inspired homeostatic approach based on a hybrid of Receptor Density Algorithm (an artificial immune system based anomaly detection application) and a Plastic Spiking Neuronal model. DRL is then introduced to run in conjunction with the above hybrid model. The system is tested on a vehicle to autonomously re-position in an unpredictable environment. Our results show that the DRL based process control raised the accuracy of the hybrid model by 32%.N/

Contextual anomaly detection in crowded surveillance scenes

AbstractThis work addresses the problem of detecting human behavioural anomalies in crowded surveillance environments. We focus in particular on the problem of detecting subtle anomalies in a behaviourally heterogeneous surveillance scene. To reach this goal we implement a novel unsupervised context-aware process. We propose and evaluate a method of utilising social context and scene context to improve behaviour analysis. We find that in a crowded scene the application of Mutual Information based social context permits the ability to prevent self-justifying groups and propagate anomalies in a social network, granting a greater anomaly detection capability. Scene context uniformly improves the detection of anomalies in both datasets. The strength of our contextual features is demonstrated by the detection of subtly abnormal behaviours, which otherwise remain indistinguishable from normal behaviour