Intrusion detection and prevention of web service attacks for software as a service:Fuzzy association rules vs fuzzy associative patterns

Cloud computing inherits all the systems, networks as well asWeb Services’ security vulnerabilities, in particular for software as a service (SaaS), where business applications or services are provided over the Cloud as Web Service (WS). Hence, WS-based applications must be protected against loss of integrity, confidentiality and availability when they are deployed over to the Cloud environment. Many existing IDP systems address only attacks mostly occurring at PaaS and IaaS. In this paper, we present our fuzzy association rule-based (FAR) and fuzzy associative pattern-based (FAP) intrusion detection and prevention (IDP) systems in defending against WS attacks at the SaaS level. Our experimental results have validated the capabilities of these two IDP systems in terms of detection of known attacks and prediction of newvariant attacks with accuracy close to 100%. For each transaction transacted over the Cloud platform, detection, prevention or prediction is carried out in less than five seconds. For load and volume testing on the SaaS where the system is under stress (at a work load of 5000 concurrent users submitting normal, suspicious and malicious transactions over a time interval of 300 seconds), the FAR IDP system provides close to 95% service availability to normal transactions. Future work involves determining more quality attributes besides service availability, such as latency, throughput and accountability for a more trustworthy SaaS

Alkire-Foster oriented ensemble fuzzy inference system for urban poverty classification

Malaysia is a developing country which relies on the monetary approach to measure poverty. The approach is simple to measure but it is insensitive towards changes of the poor in multiple dimensions such as education, health and living standards especially in urban areas. Several current issues in classifying the urban poor include rigid dichotomy of the poor and non-poor, unable to capture changes that happens in various sub-groups of urban poor population and misclassified poverty indicators. This study developed a multidimensional poverty measurement framework which integrated i) Alkire-Foster approaches in quantification of multidimensional urban poor, ii) Adaptive Neural Fuzzy Inference Systems (ANFIS) to predict classification of urban poor and resolve the misclassification of urban poor and iii) ensemble ANFIS. 300 questionnaires were distributed to targeted households in Bandar Tasik Selatan, Kuala Lumpur. This study started with a comparison of datadriven Fuzzy Rule-Based System (FRBS) with the domain expert comprising FRBS classification. Next, the Alkire-Foster method was introduced which included parameter selection, dual cut off identification and aggregation of the poor. Then, the ANFIS prediction was carried out using various ANFIS combination models such as Genfis 1, Genfis 2 and Genfis 3 to predict the classification of urban poor. This study proceeded to improve the classification by proposing the ensemble ANFIS that included ensemble weighting and ensemble integration method. The performance of this proposed framework was evaluated using Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), Mean Square Error (MSE), and R-Squared. For validation purposes, this study was reviewed by officers at the Zakat Collection Centre, Kuala Lumpur as the domain experts. The findings showed that the Genfis 3 using Fuzzy C-Means clustering algorithm in ANFIS outperformed all the ANFIS models, by obtaining the least MSE and RMSE values and highest R-Squared. These results included the Health dimension which was excluded in the current poverty measurement. Overall, this study has managed to address the urban poor classification by providing multiple dimensions of the poor and produce robust prediction results

Policy-enhanced ANFIS model to counter SOAP-related attacks

Business Intelligence or e-commerce applications are increasingly built on the Web Service platform. Thus, SOAP-related attacks have a higher chance of occurring at the Application Layer. Although active research has been on-going in Host and Network-based intrusion detection and intrusion prevention areas, they are not adequate to countermeasure the attacks occurring at the Application Layer. This is detrimental, especially for e-commerce where sensitive and huge amount of business-related information are being exposed over the Internet. Consequently, in this paper, a policy-enhanced fuzzy model with adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system features is introduced. Transactions generated by simulation reveal that SOAP-related attacks at the Application Layer can be detected and prevented by validating input values, input field lengths, and SOAP size using our model to classify the possibilities of granting or denying access to the backend application or database. Restricting the inputs using business policies further strengthens the model to be able to achieve detection accuracy of 99% and false positive rate of only 1%. Thus, our model has significantly contributed to an added layer of security protection for Web Service-based e-commerce applications. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved