A Cognitive Framework to Secure Smart Cities

The advancement in technology has transformed Cyber Physical Systems and their interface with IoT into a more sophisticated and challenging paradigm. As a result, vulnerabilities and potential attacks manifest themselves considerably more than before, forcing researchers to rethink the conventional strategies that are currently in place to secure such physical systems. This manuscript studies the complex interweaving of sensor networks and physical systems and suggests a foundational innovation in the field. In sharp contrast with the existing IDS and IPS solutions, in this paper, a preventive and proactive method is employed to stay ahead of attacks by constantly monitoring network data patterns and identifying threats that are imminent. Here, by capitalizing on the significant progress in processing power (e.g. petascale computing) and storage capacity of computer systems, we propose a deep learning approach to predict and identify various security breaches that are about to occur. The learning process takes place by collecting a large number of files of different types and running tests on them to classify them as benign or malicious. The prediction model obtained as such can then be used to identify attacks. Our project articulates a new framework for interactions between physical systems and sensor networks, where malicious packets are repeatedly learned over time while the system continually operates with respect to imperfect security mechanisms

ATLANTIDES: Automatic Configuration for Alert Verification in Network Intrusion Detection Systems

We present an architecture designed for alert verification (i.e., to reduce false positives) in network intrusion-detection systems. Our technique is based on a systematic (and automatic) anomaly-based analysis of the system output, which provides useful context information regarding the network services. The false positives raised by the NIDS analyzing the incoming traffic (which can be either signature- or anomaly-based) are reduced by correlating them with the output anomalies. We designed our architecture for TCP-based network services which have a client/server architecture (such as HTTP). Benchmarks show a substantial reduction of false positives between 50% and 100%

Statistical analysis driven optimized deep learning system for intrusion detection

Attackers have developed ever more sophisticated and intelligent ways to hack information and communication technology systems. The extent of damage an individual hacker can carry out upon infiltrating a system is well understood. A potentially catastrophic scenario can be envisaged where a nation-state intercepting encrypted financial data gets hacked. Thus, intelligent cybersecurity systems have become inevitably important for improved protection against malicious threats. However, as malware attacks continue to dramatically increase in volume and complexity, it has become ever more challenging for traditional analytic tools to detect and mitigate threat. Furthermore, a huge amount of data produced by large networks has made the recognition task even more complicated and challenging. In this work, we propose an innovative statistical analysis driven optimized deep learning system for intrusion detection. The proposed intrusion detection system (IDS) extracts optimized and more correlated features using big data visualization and statistical analysis methods (human-in-the-loop), followed by a deep autoencoder for potential threat detection. Specifically, a pre-processing module eliminates the outliers and converts categorical variables into one-hot-encoded vectors. The feature extraction module discard features with null values and selects the most significant features as input to the deep autoencoder model (trained in a greedy-wise manner). The NSL-KDD dataset from the Canadian Institute for Cybersecurity is used as a benchmark to evaluate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed architecture. Simulation results demonstrate the potential of our proposed system and its outperformance as compared to existing state-of-the-art methods and recently published novel approaches. Ongoing work includes further optimization and real-time evaluation of our proposed IDS.Comment: To appear in the 9th International Conference on Brain Inspired Cognitive Systems (BICS 2018

Network Intrusion Detection System using Deep Learning Technique

The rise in the usage of the internet in this recent time had led to tremendous development in computer networks with large volumes of information transported daily. This development has generated lots of security threats and privacy concerns on networks and data. To tackle these issues, several protective measures have been developed including the Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs). IDS plays a major backbone in network security and provides an extra layer of security to other security defence mechanisms in a network. However, existing IDS built on a signature base such as snort and the likes are unable to detect unknown and novel threats. Anomaly detection-based IDSs that use Machine Learning (ML) approaches are not scalable when enormous data are presented, and during modelling, the runtime increases as the dataset size increases which needs high computational resources to fulfil the runtime requirements. This thesis proposes a Feedforward Deep Neural Network (FFDNN) for an intrusion detection system that performs a binary classification on the popular NSL-Knowledge discovery and data mining (NSL-KDD) dataset. The model was developed from Keras API integrated into TensorFlow in Google's colaboratory software environment. Three variants of FFDNNs were trained using the NSL-KDD dataset and the network architecture consisted of two hidden layers with 64 and 32; 32 and 16; 512 and 256 neurons respectively, and each with the ReLu activation function. The sigmoid activation function for binary classification was used in the output layer and the prediction loss function used was the binary cross-entropy. Regularization was set to a dropout rate of 0.2 and the Adam optimizer was used. The deep neural networks were trained for 16, 20, 20 epochs respectively for batch sizes of 256, 64, and 128. After evaluating the performances of the FFDNNs on the training data, the prediction was made on test data, and accuracies of 89%, 84%, and 87% were achieved. The experiment was also conducted on the same training dataset (NSL-KDD) using the conventional machine learning algorithms (Random Forest; K-nearest neighbor; Logistic regression; Decision tree; and Naïve Bayes) and predictions of each algorithm on the test data gave different performance accuracies of 81%, 76%, 77%, 77%, 77%, respectively. The performance results of the FFDNNs were calculated based on some important metrics (FPR, FAR, F1 Measure, Precision), and these were compared to the conventional ML algorithms and the outcome shows that the deep neural networks performed best due to their dense architecture that made it scalable with the large size of the dataset and also offered a faster run time during training in contrast to the slow run time of the Conventional ML. This implies that when the dataset is large and a faster computation is required, then FFDNN is a better choice for best performance accuracy

Machine and deep learning techniques for detecting internet protocol version six attacks: a review

The rapid development of information and communication technologies has increased the demand for internet-facing devices that require publicly accessible internet protocol (IP) addresses, resulting in the depletion of internet protocol version 4 (IPv4) address space. As a result, internet protocol version 6 (IPv6) was designed to address this issue. However, IPv6 is still not widely used because of security concerns. An intrusion detection system (IDS) is one example of a security mechanism used to secure networks. Lately, the use of machine learning (ML) or deep learning (DL) detection models in IDSs is gaining popularity due to their ability to detect threats on IPv6 networks accurately. However, there is an apparent lack of studies that review ML and DL in IDS. Even the existing reviews of ML and DL fail to compare those techniques. Thus, this paper comprehensively elucidates ML and DL techniques and IPv6-based distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Additionally, this paper includes a qualitative comparison with other related works. Moreover, this work also thoroughly reviews the existing ML and DL-based IDSs for detecting IPv6 and IPv4 attacks. Lastly, researchers could use this review as a guide in the future to improve their work on DL and ML-based IDS

Machine Learning in IoT Security:Current Solutions and Future Challenges

The future Internet of Things (IoT) will have a deep economical, commercial and social impact on our lives. The participating nodes in IoT networks are usually resource-constrained, which makes them luring targets for cyber attacks. In this regard, extensive efforts have been made to address the security and privacy issues in IoT networks primarily through traditional cryptographic approaches. However, the unique characteristics of IoT nodes render the existing solutions insufficient to encompass the entire security spectrum of the IoT networks. This is, at least in part, because of the resource constraints, heterogeneity, massive real-time data generated by the IoT devices, and the extensively dynamic behavior of the networks. Therefore, Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) techniques, which are able to provide embedded intelligence in the IoT devices and networks, are leveraged to cope with different security problems. In this paper, we systematically review the security requirements, attack vectors, and the current security solutions for the IoT networks. We then shed light on the gaps in these security solutions that call for ML and DL approaches. We also discuss in detail the existing ML and DL solutions for addressing different security problems in IoT networks. At last, based on the detailed investigation of the existing solutions in the literature, we discuss the future research directions for ML- and DL-based IoT security