CAPTCHA Types and Breaking Techniques: Design Issues, Challenges, and Future Research Directions

The proliferation of the Internet and mobile devices has resulted in malicious bots access to genuine resources and data. Bots may instigate phishing, unauthorized access, denial-of-service, and spoofing attacks to mention a few. Authentication and testing mechanisms to verify the end-users and prohibit malicious programs from infiltrating the services and data are strong defense systems against malicious bots. Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA) is an authentication process to confirm that the user is a human hence, access is granted. This paper provides an in-depth survey on CAPTCHAs and focuses on two main things: (1) a detailed discussion on various CAPTCHA types along with their advantages, disadvantages, and design recommendations, and (2) an in-depth analysis of different CAPTCHA breaking techniques. The survey is based on over two hundred studies on the subject matter conducted since 2003 to date. The analysis reinforces the need to design more attack-resistant CAPTCHAs while keeping their usability intact. The paper also highlights the design challenges and open issues related to CAPTCHAs. Furthermore, it also provides useful recommendations for breaking CAPTCHAs

Implementation of Weighted Centroid Neural Network for Edge Preserving Image Compression

Image compression is a type of data compression applied to images. The objective of image compression is to reduce the cost for storage or transmission. Image compression is associated with removing redundant information of image data. Image storage is required for several purposes like document, medical images, etc. In this paper, an edge preserving image compression algorithm based on an unsupervised competitive neural network called weighted centroid neural network (WCNN), is implemented and compared to the other algorithms. The WCNN algorithm allots more representative vectors from the edges of the image than the interior of the image thus helping in better edge preservation of the reconstructed image. After experimenting with the cluster count it is evident that with the increase in the number of cluster the quality of the picture is improved, which is the expected behavior as more clusters leads to more representational vectors

Addressing the new generation of spam (Spam 2.0) through Web usage models

New Internet collaborative media introduce new ways of communicating that are not immune to abuse. A fake eye-catching profile in social networking websites, a promotional review, a response to a thread in online forums with unsolicited content or a manipulated Wiki page, are examples of new the generation of spam on the web, referred to as Web 2.0 Spam or Spam 2.0. Spam 2.0 is defined as the propagation of unsolicited, anonymous, mass content to infiltrate legitimate Web 2.0 applications.The current literature does not address Spam 2.0 in depth and the outcome of efforts to date are inadequate. The aim of this research is to formalise a definition for Spam 2.0 and provide Spam 2.0 filtering solutions. Early-detection, extendibility, robustness and adaptability are key factors in the design of the proposed method.This dissertation provides a comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art web spam and Spam 2.0 filtering methods to highlight the unresolved issues and open problems, while at the same time effectively capturing the knowledge in the domain of spam filtering.This dissertation proposes three solutions in the area of Spam 2.0 filtering including: (1) characterising and profiling Spam 2.0, (2) Early-Detection based Spam 2.0 Filtering (EDSF) approach, and (3) On-the-Fly Spam 2.0 Filtering (OFSF) approach. All the proposed solutions are tested against real-world datasets and their performance is compared with that of existing Spam 2.0 filtering methods.This work has coined the term ‘Spam 2.0’, provided insight into the nature of Spam 2.0, and proposed filtering mechanisms to address this new and rapidly evolving problem

Denial of Service in Web-Domains: Building Defenses Against Next-Generation Attack Behavior

The existing state-of-the-art in the field of application layer Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection is generally designed, and thus effective, only for static web domains. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first that studies the problem of application layer DDoS defense in web domains of dynamic content and organization, and for next-generation bot behaviour. In the first part of this thesis, we focus on the following research tasks: 1) we identify the main weaknesses of the existing application-layer anti-DDoS solutions as proposed in research literature and in the industry, 2) we obtain a comprehensive picture of the current-day as well as the next-generation application-layer attack behaviour and 3) we propose novel techniques, based on a multidisciplinary approach that combines offline machine learning algorithms and statistical analysis, for detection of suspicious web visitors in static web domains. Then, in the second part of the thesis, we propose and evaluate a novel anti-DDoS system that detects a broad range of application-layer DDoS attacks, both in static and dynamic web domains, through the use of advanced techniques of data mining. The key advantage of our system relative to other systems that resort to the use of challenge-response tests (such as CAPTCHAs) in combating malicious bots is that our system minimizes the number of these tests that are presented to valid human visitors while succeeding in preventing most malicious attackers from accessing the web site. The results of the experimental evaluation of the proposed system demonstrate effective detection of current and future variants of application layer DDoS attacks

LSTM Networks for Detection and Classification of Anomalies in Raw Sensor Data

In order to ensure the validity of sensor data, it must be thoroughly analyzed for various types of anomalies. Traditional machine learning methods of anomaly detections in sensor data are based on domain-specific feature engineering. A typical approach is to use domain knowledge to analyze sensor data and manually create statistics-based features, which are then used to train the machine learning models to detect and classify the anomalies. Although this methodology is used in practice, it has a significant drawback due to the fact that feature extraction is usually labor intensive and requires considerable effort from domain experts. An alternative approach is to use deep learning algorithms. Research has shown that modern deep neural networks are very effective in automated extraction of abstract features from raw data in classification tasks. Long short-term memory networks, or LSTMs in short, are a special kind of recurrent neural networks that are capable of learning long-term dependencies. These networks have proved to be especially effective in the classification of raw time-series data in various domains. This dissertation systematically investigates the effectiveness of the LSTM model for anomaly detection and classification in raw time-series sensor data. As a proof of concept, this work used time-series data of sensors that measure blood glucose levels. A large number of time-series sequences was created based on a genuine medical diabetes dataset. Anomalous series were constructed by six methods that interspersed patterns of common anomaly types in the data. An LSTM network model was trained with k-fold cross-validation on both anomalous and valid series to classify raw time-series sequences into one of seven classes: non-anomalous, and classes corresponding to each of the six anomaly types. As a control, the accuracy of detection and classification of the LSTM was compared to that of four traditional machine learning classifiers: support vector machines, Random Forests, naive Bayes, and shallow neural networks. The performance of all the classifiers was evaluated based on nine metrics: precision, recall, and the F1-score, each measured in micro, macro and weighted perspective. While the traditional models were trained on vectors of features, derived from the raw data, that were based on knowledge of common sources of anomaly, the LSTM was trained on raw time-series data. Experimental results indicate that the performance of the LSTM was comparable to the best traditional classifiers by achieving 99% accuracy in all 9 metrics. The model requires no labor-intensive feature engineering, and the fine-tuning of its architecture and hyper-parameters can be made in a fully automated way. This study, therefore, finds LSTM networks an effective solution to anomaly detection and classification in sensor data

Feature Selection and Classifier Development for Radio Frequency Device Identification

The proliferation of simple and low-cost devices, such as IEEE 802.15.4 ZigBee and Z-Wave, in Critical Infrastructure (CI) increases security concerns. Radio Frequency Distinct Native Attribute (RF-DNA) Fingerprinting facilitates biometric-like identification of electronic devices emissions from variances in device hardware. Developing reliable classifier models using RF-DNA fingerprints is thus important for device discrimination to enable reliable Device Classification (a one-to-many looks most like assessment) and Device ID Verification (a one-to-one looks how much like assessment). AFITs prior RF-DNA work focused on Multiple Discriminant Analysis/Maximum Likelihood (MDA/ML) and Generalized Relevance Learning Vector Quantized Improved (GRLVQI) classifiers. This work 1) introduces a new GRLVQI-Distance (GRLVQI-D) classifier that extends prior GRLVQI work by supporting alternative distance measures, 2) formalizes a framework for selecting competing distance measures for GRLVQI-D, 3) introducing response surface methods for optimizing GRLVQI and GRLVQI-D algorithm settings, 4) develops an MDA-based Loadings Fusion (MLF) Dimensional Reduction Analysis (DRA) method for improved classifier-based feature selection, 5) introduces the F-test as a DRA method for RF-DNA fingerprints, 6) provides a phenomenological understanding of test statistics and p-values, with KS-test and F-test statistic values being superior to p-values for DRA, and 7) introduces quantitative dimensionality assessment methods for DRA subset selection

Méthodes probabilistes basées sur les mots visuels pour la reconnaissance de lieux sémantiques par un robot mobile.

Les êtres humains définissent naturellement leur espace quotidien en unités discrètes. Par exemple, nous sommes capables d'identifier le lieu où nous sommes (e.g. le bureau 205) et sa catégorie (i.e. un bureau), sur la base de leur seule apparence visuelle. Les travaux récents en reconnaissance de lieux sémantiques, visent à doter les robots de capacités similaires. Ces unités, appelées "lieux sémantiques", sont caractérisées par une extension spatiale et une unité fonctionnelle, ce qui distingue ce domaine des travaux habituels en cartographie. Nous présentons nos travaux dans le domaine de la reconnaissance de lieux sémantiques. Ces derniers ont plusieurs originalités par rapport à l'état de l'art. Premièrement, ils combinent la caractérisation globale d'une image, intéressante car elle permet de s'affranchir des variations locales de l'apparence des lieux, et les méthodes basées sur les mots visuels, qui reposent sur la classification non-supervisée de descripteurs locaux. Deuxièmement, et de manière intimement reliée, ils tirent parti du flux d'images fourni par le robot en utilisant des méthodes bayésiennes d'intégration temporelle. Dans un premier modèle, nous ne tenons pas compte de l'ordre des images. Le mécanisme d'intégration est donc particulièrement simple mais montre des difficultés à repérer les changements de lieux. Nous élaborons donc plusieurs mécanismes de détection des transitions entre lieux qui ne nécessitent pas d'apprentissage supplémentaire. Une deuxième version enrichit le formalisme classique du filtrage bayésien en utilisant l'ordre local d'apparition des images. Nous comparons nos méthodes à l'état de l'art sur des tâches de reconnaissance d'instances et de catégorisation, en utilisant plusieurs bases de données. Nous étudions l'influence des paramètres sur les performances et comparons les différents types de codage employés sur une même base.Ces expériences montrent que nos méthodes sont supérieures à l'état de l'art, en particulier sur les tâches de catégorisation.Human beings naturally organize their space as composed of discrete units. Those units, called "semantic places", are characterized by their spatial extend and their functional unity. Moreover, we are able to quickly recognize a given place (e.g. office 205) and its category (i.e. an office), solely on their visual appearance. Recent works in semantic place recognition seek to endow the robot with similar capabilities. Contrary to classical localization and mapping work, this problem is usually tackled as a supervised learning problem. Our contributions are two fold. First, we combine global image characterization, which captures the global organization of the image, and visual words methods which are usually based unsupervised classification of local signatures. Our second but closely related, contribution is to use several images for recognition by using Bayesian methods for temporal integration. Our first model don't use the natural temporal ordering of images. Temporal integration is very simple but has difficulties when the robot moves from one place to another.We thus develop several mechanisms to detect place transitions. Those mechanisms are simple and don't require additional learning. A second model augment the classical Bayesian filtering approach by using the local order among images. We compare our methods to state-of-the-art algorithms on place recognition and place categorization tasks.We study the influence of system parameters and compare the different global characterization methods on the same dataset. These experiments show that our approach while being simple leads to better results especially on the place categorization task.PARIS11-SCD-Bib. électronique (914719901) / SudocSudocFranceF

Convolutional neural networks for face recognition and finger-vein biometric identification

The Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), a variant of the Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), has shown promise in solving complex recognition problems, particularly in visual pattern recognition. However, the classical LeNet-5 CNN model, which most solutions are based on, is highly compute-intensive. This CNN also suffers from long training time, due to the large number of layers that ranges from six to eight. In this research, a CNN model with a reduced complexity is proposed for application in face recognition and finger-vein biometric identification. A simpler architecture is obtained by fusing convolutional and subsampling layers into one layer, in conjunction with a partial connection scheme applied between the first two layers in the network. As a result, the total number of layers is reduced to four. The number of feature maps at each layer is optimized according to the type of image database being processed. Consequently, the numbers of network parameters (including neurons, trainable parameters and connections) are significantly reduced, essentially increasing the generalization ability of the network. The Stochastic Diagonal Levenberg-Marquadt (SDLM) backpropagation algorithm is modified and applied in the training of the proposed network. With this learning algorithm, the convergence rate is accelerated such that the proposed CNN converges within 15 epochs. For face recognition, the proposed CNN achieves recognition rates of 100.00% and 99.50% for AT&T and AR Purdue face databases respectively. Recognition time on the AT&T database is less than 0.003 seconds. These results outperform previous existing works. In addition, when compared with the other CNN-based face recognizer, the proposed CNN model has the least number of network parameters, hence better generalization ability. A training scheme is also proposed to recognize new categories without full CNN training. In this research, a novel CNN solution for the finger-vein biometric identification problem is also proposed. To the best of knowledge, there is no previous work reported in literature that applied CNN for finger-vein recognition. The proposed method is efficient in that simple preprocessing algorithms are deployed. The CNN design is adapted on a finger-vein database, which is developed in-house and contains 81 subjects. A recognition accuracy of 99.38% is achieved, which is similar to the results of state-of-the-art work. In conclusion, the success of the research in solving face recognition and finger-vein biometric identification problems proves the feasibility of the proposed CNN model in any pattern recognition system