Graph Mining for Cybersecurity: A Survey

The explosive growth of cyber attacks nowadays, such as malware, spam, and intrusions, caused severe consequences on society. Securing cyberspace has become an utmost concern for organizations and governments. Traditional Machine Learning (ML) based methods are extensively used in detecting cyber threats, but they hardly model the correlations between real-world cyber entities. In recent years, with the proliferation of graph mining techniques, many researchers investigated these techniques for capturing correlations between cyber entities and achieving high performance. It is imperative to summarize existing graph-based cybersecurity solutions to provide a guide for future studies. Therefore, as a key contribution of this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of graph mining for cybersecurity, including an overview of cybersecurity tasks, the typical graph mining techniques, and the general process of applying them to cybersecurity, as well as various solutions for different cybersecurity tasks. For each task, we probe into relevant methods and highlight the graph types, graph approaches, and task levels in their modeling. Furthermore, we collect open datasets and toolkits for graph-based cybersecurity. Finally, we outlook the potential directions of this field for future research

Enhancing data privacy and security in Internet of Things through decentralized models and services

exploits a Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) blockchain, in order to perform collaborative and dynamic botnet detection by collecting and auditing IoT devices\u2019 network traffic flows as blockchain transactions. Secondly, we take the challenge to decentralize IoT, and design a hybrid blockchain architecture for IoT, by proposing Hybrid-IoT. In Hybrid-IoT, subgroups of IoT devices form PoW blockchains, referred to as PoW sub-blockchains. Connection among the PoW sub-blockchains employs a BFT inter-connector framework. We focus on the PoW sub-blockchains formation, guided by a set of guidelines based on a set of dimensions, metrics and bounds

Enhancing data privacy and security in Internet of Things through decentralized models and services

exploits a Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) blockchain, in order to perform collaborative and dynamic botnet detection by collecting and auditing IoT devices’ network traffic flows as blockchain transactions. Secondly, we take the challenge to decentralize IoT, and design a hybrid blockchain architecture for IoT, by proposing Hybrid-IoT. In Hybrid-IoT, subgroups of IoT devices form PoW blockchains, referred to as PoW sub-blockchains. Connection among the PoW sub-blockchains employs a BFT inter-connector framework. We focus on the PoW sub-blockchains formation, guided by a set of guidelines based on a set of dimensions, metrics and bounds

Security of the Internet of Things: Vulnerabilities, Attacks and Countermeasures

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) constitute one of the most promising third-millennium technologies and have wide range of applications in our surrounding environment. The reason behind the vast adoption of WSNs in various applications is that they have tremendously appealing features, e.g., low production cost, low installation cost, unattended network operation, autonomous and longtime operation. WSNs have started to merge with the Internet of Things (IoT) through the introduction of Internet access capability in sensor nodes and sensing ability in Internet-connected devices. Thereby, the IoT is providing access to huge amount of data, collected by the WSNs, over the Internet. Hence, the security of IoT should start with foremost securing WSNs ahead of the other components. However, owing to the absence of a physical line-of-defense, i.e., there is no dedicated infrastructure such as gateways to watch and observe the flowing information in the network, security of WSNs along with IoT is of a big concern to the scientific community. More specifically, for the application areas in which CIA (confidentiality, integrity, availability) has prime importance, WSNs and emerging IoT technology might constitute an open avenue for the attackers. Besides, recent integration and collaboration of WSNs with IoT will open new challenges and problems in terms of security. Hence, this would be a nightmare for the individuals using these systems as well as the security administrators who are managing those networks. Therefore, a detailed review of security attacks towards WSNs and IoT, along with the techniques for prevention, detection, and mitigation of those attacks are provided in this paper. In this text, attacks are categorized and treated into mainly two parts, most or all types of attacks towards WSNs and IoT are investigated under that umbrella: “Passive Attacks” and “Active Attacks”. Understanding these attacks and their associated defense mechanisms will help paving a secure path towards the proliferation and public acceptance of IoT technology

Federated Deep Learning for collaborative intrusion detection in heterogeneous networks

In this paper, we propose Federated Deep Learning (FDL) for intrusion detection in heterogeneous networks. Local Deep Neural Network (DNN) models are used to learn the hierarchical representations of the private network traffic data in multiple edge nodes. A dedicated central server receives the parameters of the local DNN models from the edge nodes, and it aggregates them to produce an FDL model using the Fed+ fusion algorithm. Simulation results show that the FDL model achieved an accuracy of 99.27 ± 0.79%, a precision of 97.03 ± 4.22%, a recall of 98.06 ± 1.72%, an F1 score of 97.50 ± 2.55%, and a False Positive Rate (FPR) of 2.40 ± 2.47%. The classification performance and the generalisation ability of the FDL model are better than those of the local DNN models. The Fed+ algorithm outperformed two state-of-the-art fusion algorithms, namely federated averaging (FedAvg) and Coordinate Median (CM). Therefore, the DNN-Fed+ model is preferable for intrusion detection in heterogeneous wireless networks

A new model for security analysis of network anomalies for IoT devices

In the era of IoT gaining traction, attacks on IoT-enabled devices are the order of the day that emanates the need for more protected IoT networks. IoT's key feature deals with massive amounts of data sensed by numerous heterogeneous IoT devices. Numerous machine learning techniques are used to collect data from different types of sensors on the objects and transform them into information relevant to the application. Furthermore, business and data analytics algorithms help in event prediction based on observed behavior and information. Routing information securely over the internet with limited resources in IoT applications is a key problem. The study proposes a model for detecting network anomalies in IoT devices to enhance the security of the devices. The study employed the IoT Botnet dataset, and K-fold cross-validation tests were used for validating the values of evaluation metrics. The average values of Accuracy, Precision, Recall, and F Score was 97.4

From Intrusion Detection to Attacker Attribution: A Comprehensive Survey of Unsupervised Methods

Over the last five years there has been an increase in the frequency and diversity of network attacks. This holds true, as more and more organisations admit compromises on a daily basis. Many misuse and anomaly based Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) that rely on either signatures, supervised or statistical methods have been proposed in the literature, but their trustworthiness is debatable. Moreover, as this work uncovers, the current IDSs are based on obsolete attack classes that do not reflect the current attack trends. For these reasons, this paper provides a comprehensive overview of unsupervised and hybrid methods for intrusion detection, discussing their potential in the domain. We also present and highlight the importance of feature engineering techniques that have been proposed for intrusion detection. Furthermore, we discuss that current IDSs should evolve from simple detection to correlation and attribution. We descant how IDS data could be used to reconstruct and correlate attacks to identify attackers, with the use of advanced data analytics techniques. Finally, we argue how the present IDS attack classes can be extended to match the modern attacks and propose three new classes regarding the outgoing network communicatio

IoT Anomaly Detection Methods and Applications: A Survey

Ongoing research on anomaly detection for the Internet of Things (IoT) is a rapidly expanding field. This growth necessitates an examination of application trends and current gaps. The vast majority of those publications are in areas such as network and infrastructure security, sensor monitoring, smart home, and smart city applications and are extending into even more sectors. Recent advancements in the field have increased the necessity to study the many IoT anomaly detection applications. This paper begins with a summary of the detection methods and applications, accompanied by a discussion of the categorization of IoT anomaly detection algorithms. We then discuss the current publications to identify distinct application domains, examining papers chosen based on our search criteria. The survey considers 64 papers among recent publications published between January 2019 and July 2021. In recent publications, we observed a shortage of IoT anomaly detection methodologies, for example, when dealing with the integration of systems with various sensors, data and concept drifts, and data augmentation where there is a shortage of Ground Truth data. Finally, we discuss the present such challenges and offer new perspectives where further research is required.Comment: 22 page

Security of Internet of Things (IoT) Using Federated Learning and Deep Learning — Recent Advancements, Issues and Prospects

There is a great demand for an efficient security framework which can secure IoT systems from potential adversarial attacks. However, it is challenging to design a suitable security model for IoT considering the dynamic and distributed nature of IoT. This motivates the researchers to focus more on investigating the role of machine learning (ML) in the designing of security models. A brief analysis of different ML algorithms for IoT security is discussed along with the advantages and limitations of ML algorithms. Existing studies state that ML algorithms suffer from the problem of high computational overhead and risk of privacy leakage. In this context, this review focuses on the implementation of federated learning (FL) and deep learning (DL) algorithms for IoT security. Unlike conventional ML techniques, FL models can maintain the privacy of data while sharing information with other systems. The study suggests that FL can overcome the drawbacks of conventional ML techniques in terms of maintaining the privacy of data while sharing information with other systems. The study discusses different models, overview, comparisons, and summarization of FL and DL-based techniques for IoT security

A survey of IoT security based on a layered architecture of sensing and data analysis

The Internet of Things (IoT) is leading today’s digital transformation. Relying on a combination of technologies, protocols, and devices such as wireless sensors and newly developed wearable and implanted sensors, IoT is changing every aspect of daily life, especially recent applications in digital healthcare. IoT incorporates various kinds of hardware, communication protocols, and services. This IoT diversity can be viewed as a double-edged sword that provides comfort to users but can lead also to a large number of security threats and attacks. In this survey paper, a new compacted and optimized architecture for IoT is proposed based on five layers. Likewise, we propose a new classification of security threats and attacks based on new IoT architecture. The IoT architecture involves a physical perception layer, a network and protocol layer, a transport layer, an application layer, and a data and cloud services layer. First, the physical sensing layer incorporates the basic hardware used by IoT. Second, we highlight the various network and protocol technologies employed by IoT, and review the security threats and solutions. Transport protocols are exhibited and the security threats against them are discussed while providing common solutions. Then, the application layer involves application protocols and lightweight encryption algorithms for IoT. Finally, in the data and cloud services layer, the main important security features of IoT cloud platforms are addressed, involving confidentiality, integrity, authorization, authentication, and encryption protocols. The paper is concluded by presenting the open research issues and future directions towards securing IoT, including the lack of standardized lightweight encryption algorithms, the use of machine-learning algorithms to enhance security and the related challenges, the use of Blockchain to address security challenges in IoT, and the implications of IoT deployment in 5G and beyond