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

ARF : an Automated Real-Time Fuzzy Logic Threat Evaluation System.

Intrusion Detection has emerged as a powerful component of network security systems. A wide range of hardware and software components exist to meet most basic security needs on all platforms. These systems log system usage that could be considered as a breach of security in many networks. However, signature based intrusion detection systems have one catastrophic downfall, in that the number of alerts being logged can quickly outgrow the amount of resources necessary to investigate this anomalous behavior. This thesis explores the use of a fuzzy logic based analysis engine that gives an overall threat level of an intrusion detection sensor, prioritizing alerts that are the most threatening. This application gives security personnel a launching point to determine where security holes exist and a snapshot of the threats that exist in a system. The fuzzy logic system is based on a set of membership functions that define certain metrics from an alert dataset and a set of rules that determine a threat level based on the defined metrics. This application functions as a proof of concept prototype for an administrative tool that can analyze multiple sensors across multiple networks and give a reasonable output of the threat level across a series of intrusion detection sensors on a network. Initial testing indicates promising performance results for testing the threat level of a remote sensor using this methodology

Exploiting non-dominance in multi agent systems: An artificial immune algorithm for distributed and complex Problem solving environments

An ideal Multi Agent System is flat and has no dominant hierarchy. Multi agent computational and problem solving environments have been advocated for their ability to deliver overall solutions that are innovative and creative. There is however a significant threat to the coherence of Multi Agent Systems; chaos. This paper poses a new vision to the control and immunisation of the Multi Agent Systems against chaos. Employing a complexity measure of the problem and its lower and upper bounds, and monitoring the complexity of the problem solving agents’ interactions, we propose the holistic control of the Multi Agent Systems that leads to immunisation of the system against chaos. The control however is not central and appears in the form of the agents’ common knowledge and determines their tendency to proactively communicate

Unsupervised Intrusion Detection with Cross-Domain Artificial Intelligence Methods

Cybercrime is a major concern for corporations, business owners, governments and citizens, and it continues to grow in spite of increasing investments in security and fraud prevention. The main challenges in this research field are: being able to detect unknown attacks, and reducing the false positive ratio. The aim of this research work was to target both problems by leveraging four artificial intelligence techniques. The first technique is a novel unsupervised learning method based on skip-gram modeling. It was designed, developed and tested against a public dataset with popular intrusion patterns. A high accuracy and a low false positive rate were achieved without prior knowledge of attack patterns. The second technique is a novel unsupervised learning method based on topic modeling. It was applied to three related domains (network attacks, payments fraud, IoT malware traffic). A high accuracy was achieved in the three scenarios, even though the malicious activity significantly differs from one domain to the other. The third technique is a novel unsupervised learning method based on deep autoencoders, with feature selection performed by a supervised method, random forest. Obtained results showed that this technique can outperform other similar techniques. The fourth technique is based on an MLP neural network, and is applied to alert reduction in fraud prevention. This method automates manual reviews previously done by human experts, without significantly impacting accuracy

Nature-inspired survivability: Prey-inspired survivability countermeasures for cloud computing security challenges

As cloud computing environments become complex, adversaries have become highly sophisticated and unpredictable. Moreover, they can easily increase attack power and persist longer before detection. Uncertain malicious actions, latent risks, Unobserved or Unobservable risks (UUURs) characterise this new threat domain. This thesis proposes prey-inspired survivability to address unpredictable security challenges borne out of UUURs. While survivability is a well-addressed phenomenon in non-extinct prey animals, applying prey survivability to cloud computing directly is challenging due to contradicting end goals. How to manage evolving survivability goals and requirements under contradicting environmental conditions adds to the challenges. To address these challenges, this thesis proposes a holistic taxonomy which integrate multiple and disparate perspectives of cloud security challenges. In addition, it proposes the TRIZ (Teorija Rezbenija Izobretatelskib Zadach) to derive prey-inspired solutions through resolving contradiction. First, it develops a 3-step process to facilitate interdomain transfer of concepts from nature to cloud. Moreover, TRIZ’s generic approach suggests specific solutions for cloud computing survivability. Then, the thesis presents the conceptual prey-inspired cloud computing survivability framework (Pi-CCSF), built upon TRIZ derived solutions. The framework run-time is pushed to the user-space to support evolving survivability design goals. Furthermore, a target-based decision-making technique (TBDM) is proposed to manage survivability decisions. To evaluate the prey-inspired survivability concept, Pi-CCSF simulator is developed and implemented. Evaluation results shows that escalating survivability actions improve the vitality of vulnerable and compromised virtual machines (VMs) by 5% and dramatically improve their overall survivability. Hypothesis testing conclusively supports the hypothesis that the escalation mechanisms can be applied to enhance the survivability of cloud computing systems. Numeric analysis of TBDM shows that by considering survivability preferences and attitudes (these directly impacts survivability actions), the TBDM method brings unpredictable survivability information closer to decision processes. This enables efficient execution of variable escalating survivability actions, which enables the Pi-CCSF’s decision system (DS) to focus upon decisions that achieve survivability outcomes under unpredictability imposed by UUUR

A theoretical and practical approach to a persuasive agent model for change behaviour in oral care and hygiene

There is an increased use of the persuasive agent in behaviour change interventions due to the agent‘s features of sociable, reactive, autonomy, and proactive. However, many interventions have been unsuccessful, particularly in the domain of oral care. The psychological reactance has been identified as one of the major reasons for these unsuccessful behaviour change interventions. This study proposes a formal persuasive agent model that leads to psychological reactance reduction in order to achieve an improved behaviour change intervention in oral care and hygiene. Agent-based simulation methodology is adopted for the development of the proposed model. Evaluation of the model was conducted in two phases that include verification and validation. The verification process involves simulation trace and stability analysis. On the other hand, the validation was carried out using user-centred approach by developing an agent-based application based on belief-desire-intention architecture. This study contributes an agent model which is made up of interrelated cognitive and behavioural factors. Furthermore, the simulation traces provide some insights on the interactions among the identified factors in order to comprehend their roles in behaviour change intervention. The simulation result showed that as time increases, the psychological reactance decreases towards zero. Similarly, the model validation result showed that the percentage of respondents‘ who experienced psychological reactance towards behaviour change in oral care and hygiene was reduced from 100 percent to 3 percent. The contribution made in this thesis would enable agent application and behaviour change intervention designers to make scientific reasoning and predictions. Likewise, it provides a guideline for software designers on the development of agent-based applications that may not have psychological reactance

Development and evaluation of a fault detection and identification scheme for the WVU YF-22 UAV using the artificial immune system approach

A failure detection and identification (FDI) scheme is developed for a small remotely controlled jet aircraft based on the Artificial Immune System (AIS) paradigm. Pilot-in-the-loop flight data are used to develop and test a scheme capable of identifying known and unknown aircraft actuator and sensor failures. Negative selection is used as the main mechanism for self/non-self definition; however, an alternative approach using positive selection to enhance performance is also presented. Tested failures include aileron and stabilator locked at trim and angular rate sensor bias. Hyper-spheres are chosen to represent detectors. Different definitions of distance for the matching rules are applied and their effect on the behavior of hyper-bodies is discussed. All the steps involved in the creation of the scheme are presented including design selections embedded in the different algorithms applied to generate the detectors set. The evaluation of the scheme is performed in terms of detection rate, false alarms, and detection time for normal conditions and upset conditions. The proposed detection scheme achieves good detection performance for all flight conditions considered. This approach proves promising potential to cope with the multidimensional characteristics of integrated/comprehensive detection for aircraft sub-system failures.;A preliminary performance comparison between an AIS based FDI scheme and a Neural Network and Floating Threshold based one is presented including groundwork on assessing possible improvements on pilot situational awareness aided by FDI schemes. Initial results favor the AIS approach to FDI due to its rather undemanding adaptation capabilities to new environments. The presence of the FDI scheme suggests benefits for the interaction between the pilot and the upset conditions by improving the accuracy of the identification of each particular failure and decreasing the detection delays