A user-oriented network forensic analyser: the design of a high-level protocol analyser

Network forensics is becoming an increasingly important tool in the investigation of cyber and computer-assisted crimes. Unfortunately, whilst much effort has been undertaken in developing computer forensic file system analysers (e.g. Encase and FTK), such focus has not been given to Network Forensic Analysis Tools (NFATs). The single biggest barrier to effective NFATs is the handling of large volumes of low-level traffic and being able to exact and interpret forensic artefacts and their context – for example, being able extract and render application-level objects (such as emails, web pages and documents) from the low-level TCP/IP traffic but also understand how these applications/artefacts are being used. Whilst some studies and tools are beginning to achieve object extraction, results to date are limited to basic objects. No research has focused upon analysing network traffic to understand the nature of its use – not simply looking at the fact a person requested a webpage, but how long they spend on the application and what interactions did they have with whilst using the service (e.g. posting an image, or engaging in an instant message chat). This additional layer of information can provide an investigator with a far more rich and complete understanding of a suspect’s activities. To this end, this paper presents an investigation into the ability to derive high-level application usage characteristics from low-level network traffic meta-data. The paper presents a three application scenarios – web surfing, communications and social networking and demonstrates it is possible to derive the user interactions (e.g. page loading, chatting and file sharing ) within these systems. The paper continues to present a framework that builds upon this capability to provide a robust, flexible and user-friendly NFAT that provides access to a greater range of forensic information in a far easier format

Malware Detection using Machine Learning and Deep Learning

Research shows that over the last decade, malware has been growing exponentially, causing substantial financial losses to various organizations. Different anti-malware companies have been proposing solutions to defend attacks from these malware. The velocity, volume, and the complexity of malware are posing new challenges to the anti-malware community. Current state-of-the-art research shows that recently, researchers and anti-virus organizations started applying machine learning and deep learning methods for malware analysis and detection. We have used opcode frequency as a feature vector and applied unsupervised learning in addition to supervised learning for malware classification. The focus of this tutorial is to present our work on detecting malware with 1) various machine learning algorithms and 2) deep learning models. Our results show that the Random Forest outperforms Deep Neural Network with opcode frequency as a feature. Also in feature reduction, Deep Auto-Encoders are overkill for the dataset, and elementary function like Variance Threshold perform better than others. In addition to the proposed methodologies, we will also discuss the additional issues and the unique challenges in the domain, open research problems, limitations, and future directions.Comment: 11 Pages and 3 Figure

SciTech News Volume 71, No. 1 (2017)

Columns and Reports From the Editor 3 Division News Science-Technology Division 5 Chemistry Division 8 Engineering Division Aerospace Section of the Engineering Division 9 Architecture, Building Engineering, Construction and Design Section of the Engineering Division 11 Reviews Sci-Tech Book News Reviews 12 Advertisements IEEE

Design intelligence of web application for internet direct consumer-to-consumer trading

An online web application called Student-Trade has been developed. It is a state-of-the-art platform for direct consumer-to-consumer trading in the Internet. The platform is targeted for direct consumer-to-consumer trading among university students. The items for trading include books, household items, electronics, housing rental, sports equipment and tutoring services. This paper is on the design intelligence of the Student-Trade web application. One objective is to help the user to decide on the selling price of his item when the item is being posted in the web application. The system integrates a hybrid neighborhood search algorithm for determining the price of sale item when it is placed for trading in the Internet. Data mining techniques are explored for efficient processing of a vast amount of information in the database tables. In addition, the trading system would also have the intelligence of recommending items or products to a potential buyer given the previous purchase patterns. The aim is to provide a pleasant trading experience for the user. © 2015 IEEE.published_or_final_versio