Geometry-based Detection of Flash Worms

While it takes traditional internet worms hours to infect all the vulnerable hosts on the Internet, a flash worm takes seconds. Because of the rapid rate with which flash worms spread, the existing worm defense mechanisms cannot respond fast enough to detect and stop the flash worm infections. In this project, we propose a geometric-based detection mechanism that can detect the spread of flash worms in a short period of time. We tested the mechanism on various simulated flash worm traffics consisting of more than 10,000 nodes. In addition to testing on flash worm traffics, we also tested the mechanism on non-flash worm traffics to see if our detection mechanism produces false alarms. In order to efficiently analyze bulks of various network traffics, we implemented an application that can be used to convert the network traffic data into graphical notations. Using the application, the analysis can be done graphically as it displays the large amount of network relationships as tree structures

Information Fusion for Anomaly Detection with the Dendritic Cell Algorithm

Dendritic cells are antigen presenting cells that provide a vital link between the innate and adaptive immune system, providing the initial detection of pathogenic invaders. Research into this family of cells has revealed that they perform information fusion which directs immune responses. We have derived a Dendritic Cell Algorithm based on the functionality of these cells, by modelling the biological signals and differentiation pathways to build a control mechanism for an artificial immune system. We present algorithmic details in addition to experimental results, when the algorithm was applied to anomaly detection for the detection of port scans. The results show the Dendritic Cell Algorithm is sucessful at detecting port scans.Comment: 21 pages, 17 figures, Information Fusio

Management and Security of IoT systems using Microservices

Devices that assist the user with some task or help them to make an informed decision are called smart devices. A network of such devices connected to internet are collectively called as Internet of Things (IoT). The applications of IoT are expanding exponentially and are becoming a part of our day to day lives. The rise of IoT led to new security and management issues. In this project, we propose a solution for some major problems faced by the IoT devices, including the problem of complexity due to heterogeneous platforms and the lack of IoT device monitoring for security and fault tolerance. We aim to solve the above issues in a microservice architecture. We build a data pipeline for IoT devices to send data through a messaging platform Kafka and monitor the devices using the collected data by making real time dashboards and a machine learning model to give better insights of the data. For proof of concept, we test the proposed solution on a heterogeneous cluster, including Raspberry Pi’s and IoT devices from different vendors. We validate our design by presenting some simple experimental results

Mal-Netminer: Malware Classification Approach based on Social Network Analysis of System Call Graph

As the security landscape evolves over time, where thousands of species of malicious codes are seen every day, antivirus vendors strive to detect and classify malware families for efficient and effective responses against malware campaigns. To enrich this effort, and by capitalizing on ideas from the social network analysis domain, we build a tool that can help classify malware families using features driven from the graph structure of their system calls. To achieve that, we first construct a system call graph that consists of system calls found in the execution of the individual malware families. To explore distinguishing features of various malware species, we study social network properties as applied to the call graph, including the degree distribution, degree centrality, average distance, clustering coefficient, network density, and component ratio. We utilize features driven from those properties to build a classifier for malware families. Our experimental results show that influence-based graph metrics such as the degree centrality are effective for classifying malware, whereas the general structural metrics of malware are less effective for classifying malware. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed system performs well in detecting and classifying malware families within each malware class with accuracy greater than 96%.Comment: Mathematical Problems in Engineering, Vol 201