In order to prevent malicious environment, more and more applications use anti-sandbox technology to detect the running environment. Malware often uses this technology against analysis, which brings great difficulties to the analysis of applications. Research on anti-sandbox countermeasure technology based on application virtualization can solve such problems, but there is no good solution for sensor simulation. In order to prevent detection, most detection systems can only use real device sensors, which brings great hidden dangers to users’ privacy. Aiming at this problem, this paper proposes and implements a sensor anti-sandbox countermeasure technology for Android system. This technology uses the CNN-LSTM model to identify the activity of the real machine sensor data, and according to the recognition results, the real machine sensor data is classified and stored, and then an automatic data simulation algorithm is designed according to the stored data, and finally the simulation data is sent back by using the Hook technology for the application under test. The experimental results show that the method can effectively simulate the data characteristics of the acceleration sensor and prevent the triggering of anti-sandbox behaviors.
Authored by Jin Yang, Yunqing Liu
Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems play pivotal role in the operation of modern critical infrastructures (CIs). Technological advancements, innovations, economic trends, etc. have continued to improve SCADA systems effectiveness and overall CIs’ throughput. However, the trends have also continued to expose SCADA systems to security menaces. Intrusions and attacks on SCADA systems can cause service disruptions, equipment damage or/and even fatalities. The use of conventional intrusion detection models have shown trends of ineffectiveness due to the complexity and sophistication of modern day SCADA attacks and intrusions. Also, SCADA characteristics and requirement necessitate exceptional security considerations with regards to intrusive events’ mitigations. This paper explores the viability of supervised learning algorithms in detecting intrusions specific to SCADA systems and their communication protocols. Specifically, we examine four supervised learning algorithms: Random Forest, Naïve Bayes, J48 Decision Tree and Sequential Minimal Optimization-Support Vector Machines (SMO-SVM) for evaluating SCADA datasets. Two SCADA datasets were used for evaluating the performances of our approach. To improve the classification performances, feature selection using principal component analysis was used to preprocess the datasets. Using prominent classification metrics, the SVM-SMO presented the best overall results with regards to the two datasets. In summary, results showed that supervised learning algorithms were able to classify intrusions targeted against SCADA systems with satisfactory performances.
Authored by Oyeniyi Alimi, Khmaies Ouahada, Adnan Abu-Mahfouz, Suvendi Rimer, Kuburat Alimi
Cooperative secure computing based on the relationship between numerical value and numerical interval is not only the basic problems of secure multiparty computing but also the core problems of cooperative secure computing. It is of substantial theoretical and practical significance for information security in relation to scientific computing to continuously investigate and construct solutions to such problems. Based on the Goldwasser-Micali homomorphic encryption scheme, this paper propose the Morton rule, according to the characteristics of the interval, a double-length vector is constructed to participate in the exclusive-or operation, and an efficient cooperative decision-making solution for integer and integer interval security is designed. This solution can solve more basic problems in cooperative security computation after suitable transformations. A theoretical analysis shows that this solution is safe and efficient. Finally, applications that are based on these protocols are presented.
Authored by Shaofeng Lu, Chengzhe Lv, Wei Wang, Changqing Xu, Huadan Fan, Yuefeng Lu, Yulong Hu, Wenxi Li
Since the advent of the Software Defined Networking (SDN) in 2011 and formation of Open Networking Foundation (ONF), SDN inspired projects have emerged in various fields of computer networks. Almost all the networking organizations are working on their products to be supported by SDN concept e.g. openflow. SDN has provided a great flexibility and agility in the networks by application specific control functions with centralized controller, but it does not provide security guarantees for security vulnerabilities inside applications, data plane and controller platform. As SDN can also use third party applications, an infected application can be distributed in the network and SDN based systems may be easily collapsed. In this paper, a security threats assessment model has been presented which highlights the critical areas with security requirements in SDN. Based on threat assessment model a proposed Security Threats Assessment and Diagnostic System (STADS) is presented for establishing a reliable SDN framework. The proposed STADS detects and diagnose various threats based on specified policy mechanism when different components of SDN communicate with controller to fulfil network requirements. Mininet network emulator with Ryu controller has been used for implementation and analysis.
Authored by Pradeep Sharma, Brijesh Kumar, S.S Tyagi
The dynamic state of networks presents a challenge for the deployment of distributed applications and protocols. Ad-hoc schedules in the updating phase might lead to a lot of ambiguity and issues. By separating the control and data planes and centralizing control, Software Defined Networking (SDN) offers novel opportunities and remedies for these issues. However, software-based centralized architecture for distributed environments introduces significant challenges. Security is a main and crucial issue in SDN. This paper presents a deep study of the state-of-the-art of security challenges and solutions for the SDN paradigm. The conducted study helped us to propose a dynamic approach to efficiently detect different security violations and incidents caused by network updates including forwarding loop, forwarding black hole, link congestion, network policy violation, etc. Our solution relies on an intelligent approach based on the use of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence Algorithms.
Authored by Amina SAHBI, Faouzi JAIDI, Adel BOUHOULA
The development of autonomous agents have gained renewed interest, largely due to the recent successes of machine learning. Social robots can be considered a special class of autonomous agents that are often intended to be integrated into sensitive environments. We present experiences from our work with two specific humanoid social service robots, and highlight how eschewing privacy and security by design principles leads to implementations with serious privacy and security flaws. The paper introduces the robots as platforms and their associated features, ecosystems and cloud platforms that are required for certain use cases or tasks. The paper encourages design aims for privacy and security, and then in this light studies the implementation from two different manufacturers. The results show a worrisome lack of design focus in handling privacy and security. The paper aims not to cover all the security flaws and possible mitigations, but does look closer into the use of the WebSocket protocol and it’s challenges when used for operational control. The conclusions of the paper provide insights on how manufacturers can rectify the discovered security flaws and presents key policies like accountability when it comes to implementing technical features of autonomous agents.
Authored by Dennis Biström, Magnus Westerlund, Bob Duncan, Martin Jaatun
The new architecture of transformer networks proposed in the work can be used to create an intelligent chat bot that can learn the process of communication and immediately model responses based on what has been said. The essence of the new mechanism is to divide the information flow into two branches containing the history of the dialogue with different levels of granularity. Such a mechanism makes it possible to build and develop the personality of a dialogue agent in the process of dialogue, that is, to accurately imitate the natural behavior of a person. This gives the interlocutor (client) the feeling of talking to a real person. In addition, making modifications to the structure of such a network makes it possible to identify a likely attack using social engineering methods. The results obtained after training the created system showed the fundamental possibility of using a neural network of a new architecture to generate responses close to natural ones. Possible options for using such neural network dialogue agents in various fields, and, in particular, in information security systems, are considered. Possible options for using such neural network dialogue agents in various fields, and, in particular, in information security systems, are considered. The new technology can be used in social engineering attack detection systems, which is a big problem at present. The novelty and prospects of the proposed architecture of the neural network also lies in the possibility of creating on its basis dialogue systems with a high level of biological plausibility.
Authored by V. Ryndyuk, Y. Varakin, E. Pisarenko
The volume of SMS messages sent on a daily basis globally has continued to grow significantly over the past years. Hence, mobile phones are becoming increasingly vulnerable to SMS spam messages, thereby exposing users to the risk of fraud and theft of personal data. Filtering of messages to detect and eliminate SMS spam is now a critical functionality for which different types of machine learning approaches are still being explored. In this paper, we propose a system for detecting SMS spam using a semi-supervised novelty detection approach based on one class SVM classifier. The system is built as an anomaly detector that learns only from normal SMS messages thus enabling detection models to be implemented in the absence of labelled SMS spam training examples. We evaluated our proposed system using a benchmark dataset consisting of 747 SMS spam and 4827 non-spam messages. The results show that our proposed method out-performed the traditional supervised machine learning approaches based on binary, frequency or TF-IDF bag-of-words. The overall accuracy was 98% with 100% SMS spam detection rate and only around 3% false positive rate.
Authored by Suleiman Yerima, Abul Bashar
In today’s digital world, Mobile SMS (short message service) communication has almost become a part of every human life. Meanwhile each mobile user suffers from the harass of Spam SMS. These Spam SMS constitute veritable nuisance to mobile subscribers. Though hackers or spammers try to intrude in mobile computing devices, SMS support for mobile devices become more vulnerable as attacker tries to intrude into the system by sending unsolicited messages. An attacker can gain remote access over mobile devices. We propose a novel approach that can analyze message content and find features using the TF-IDF techniques to efficiently detect Spam Messages and Ham messages using different Machine Learning Classifiers. The Classifiers going to use in proposed work can be measured with the help of metrics such as Accuracy, Precision and Recall. In our proposed approach accuracy rate will be increased by using the Voting Classifier.
Authored by Ganesh Ubale, Siddharth Gaikwad
Community question answering (CQA) websites have become very popular platforms attracting numerous participants to share and acquire knowledge and information in Internet However, with the rapid growth of crowdsourcing systems, many malicious users organize collusive attacks against the CQA platforms for promoting a target (product or service) via posting suggestive questions and deceptive answers. These manipulate deceptive contents, aggregating into multiple collusive questions and answers (Q&As) spam groups, can fully control the sentiment of a target and distort the decision of users, which pollute the CQA environment and make it less credible. In this paper, we propose a Pattern and Burstiness based Collusive Q&A Spam Detection method (PBCSD) to identify the deceptive questions and answers. Specifically, we intensively study the campaign process of crowdsourcing tasks and summarize the clues in the Q&As’ vocabulary usage level when collusive attacks are launched. Based on the clues, we extract the Q&A groups using frequent pattern mining and further purify them by the burstiness on posting time of Q&As. By designing several discriminative features at the Q&A group level, multiple machine learning based classifiers can be used to judge the groups as deceptive or ordinary, and the Q&As in deceptive groups are finally identified as collusive Q&A spam. We evaluate the proposed PBCSD method in a real-world dataset collected from Baidu Zhidao, a famous CQA platform in China, and the experimental results demonstrate the PBCSD is effective for collusive Q&A spam detection and outperforms a number of state-of-art methods.
Authored by Mingming Xu, Lu Zhang, Haiting Zhu
Now a days there are many online social networks (OSN) which are very popular among Internet users and use this platform for finding new connections, sharing their activities and thoughts. Twitter is such social media platforms which is very popular among this users. Survey says, it has more than 310 million monthly users who are very active and post around 500+ million tweets in a day and this attracts, the spammer or cyber-criminal to misuse this platform for their malicious benefits. Product advertisement, phishing true users, pornography propagation, stealing the trending news, sharing malicious link to get the victims for making money are the common example of the activities of spammers. In Aug-2014, Twitter made public that 8.5% of its active Twitter users (monthly) that is approx. 23+ million users, who have automatically contacted their servers for regular updates. Thus for a spam free environment in twitter, it is greatly required to detect and filter these spammer from the legitimate users. Here in our research paper, effectiveness & features of twitter spam detection, various methods are summarized with their benefits and limitations are presented. [1]
Authored by Lipsa Das, Laxmi Ahuja, Adesh Pandey
All of us are familiar with the importance of social media in facilitating communication. e-mail is one of the safest social media platforms for online communications and information transfer over the internet. As of now, many people rely on email or communications provided by strangers. Because everyone may send emails or a message, spammers have a great opportunity to compose spam messages about our many hobbies and passions, interests, and concerns. Our internet speeds are severely slowed down by spam, which also collects personal information like our phone numbers from our contact list. There is a lot of work involved in identifying these fraudsters and also identifying spam content. Email spam refers to the practice of sending large numbers of messages via email. The recipient bears the bulk of the cost of spam, therefore it's practically free advertising. Spam email is a form of commercial advertising for hackers that is financially viable due of the low cost of sending email. Anti-spam filters have become increasingly important as the volume of unwanted bulk e-mail (also spamming) grows. We can define a message, if it is a spam or not using this proposed model. Machine learning algorithms can be discussed in detail, and our data sets will be used to test them all, with the goal of identifying the one that is most accurate and precise in its identification of email spam. Society of machine learning techniques for detecting unsolicited mass email and spam.
Authored by V. Sasikala, K. Mounika, Sravya Tulasi, D. Gayathri, M. Anjani
Aim: To bring off the spam detection in social media using Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm and compare accuracy with Artificial Neural Network (ANN) algorithm sample size of dataset is 5489, Initially the dataset contains several messages which includes spam and ham messages 80% messages are taken as training and 20% of messages are taken as testing. Materials and Methods: Classification was performed by KNN algorithm (N=10) for spam detection in social media and the accuracy was compared with SVM algorithm (N=10) with G power 80% and alpha value 0.05. Results: The value obtained in terms of accuracy was identified by ANN algorithm (98.2%) and for SVM algorithm (96.2%) with significant value 0.749. Conclusion: The accuracy of detecting spam using the ANN algorithm appears to be slightly better than the SVM algorithm.
Authored by Grandhi Svadasu, M. Adimoolam
The evolving and new age cybersecurity threats has set the information security industry on high alert. This modern age cyberattacks includes malware, phishing, artificial intelligence, machine learning and cryptocurrency. Our research highlights the importance and role of Software Quality Assurance for increasing the security standards that will not just protect the system but will handle the cyber-attacks better. With the series of cyber-attacks, we have concluded through our research that implementing code review and penetration testing will protect our data's integrity, availability, and confidentiality. We gathered user requirements of an application, gained a proper understanding of the functional as well as non-functional requirements. We implemented conventional software quality assurance techniques successfully but found that the application software was still vulnerable to potential issues. We proposed two additional stages in software quality assurance process to cater with this problem. After implementing this framework, we saw that maximum number of potential threats were already fixed before the first release of the software.
Authored by Ammar Haider, Wafa Bhatti
Aviation is a highly sophisticated and complex System-of-Systems (SoSs) with equally complex safety oversight. As novel products with autonomous functions and interactions between component systems are adopted, the number of interdependencies within and among the SoS grows. These interactions may not always be obvious. Understanding how proposed products (component systems) fit into the context of a larger SoS is essential to promote the safe use of new as well as conventional technology.UL 4600, is a Standard for Safety for the Evaluation of Autonomous Products specifically written for completely autonomous Load vehicles. The goal-based, technology-neutral features of this standard make it adaptable to other industries and applications.This paper, using the philosophy of UL 4600, gives guidance for creating an assurance case for products in an SoS context. An assurance argument is a cogent structured argument concluding that an autonomous aircraft system possesses all applicable through-life performance and safety properties. The assurance case process can be repeated at each level in the SoS: aircraft, aircraft system, unmodified components, and modified components. The original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) develops the assurance case for the whole aircraft envisioned in the type certification process. Assurance cases are continuously validated by collecting and analyzing Safety Performance Indicators (SPIs). SPIs provide predictive safety information, thus offering an opportunity to improve safety by preventing incidents and accidents. Continuous validation is essential for risk-based approval of autonomously evolving (dynamic) systems, learning systems, and new technology. System variants, derivatives, and components are captured in a subordinate assurance case by their developer. These variants of the assurance case inherently reflect the evolution of the vehicle-level derivatives and options in the context of their specific target ecosystem. These subordinate assurance cases are nested under the argument put forward by the OEM of components and aircraft, for certification credit.It has become a common practice in aviation to address design hazards through operational mitigations. It is also common for hazards noted in an aircraft component system to be mitigated within another component system. Where a component system depends on risk mitigation in another component of the SoS, organizational responsibilities must be stated explicitly in the assurance case. However, current practices do not formalize accounting for these dependencies by the parties responsible for design; consequently, subsequent modifications are made without the benefit of critical safety-related information from the OEMs. The resulting assurance cases, including 3rd party vehicle modifications, must be scrutinized as part of the holistic validation process.When changes are made to a product represented within the assurance case, their impact must be analyzed and reflected in an updated assurance case. An OEM can facilitate this by integrating affected assurance cases across their customer’s supply chains to ensure their validity. The OEM is expected to exercise the sphere-of-control over their product even if it includes outsourced components. Any organization that modifies a product (with or without assurance argumentation information from other suppliers) is accountable for validating the conditions for any dependent mitigations. For example, the OEM may manage the assurance argumentation by identifying requirements and supporting SPI that must be applied in all component assurance cases. For their part, component assurance cases must accommodate all spheres-of-control that mitigate the risks they present in their respective contexts. The assurance case must express how interdependent mitigations will collectively assure the outcome. These considerations are much more than interface requirements and include explicit hazard mitigation dependencies between SoS components. A properly integrated SoS assurance case reflects a set of interdependent systems that could be independently developed..Even in this extremely interconnected environment, stakeholders must make accommodations for the independent evolution of products in a manner that protects proprietary information, domain knowledge, and safety data. The collective safety outcome for the SoS is based on the interdependence of mitigations by each constituent component and could not be accomplished by any single component. This dependency must be explicit in the assurance case and should include operational mitigations predicated on people and processes.Assurance cases could be used to gain regulatory approval of conventional and new technology. They can also serve to demonstrate consistency with a desired level of safety, especially in SoSs whose existing standards may not be adequate. This paper also provides guidelines for preserving alignment between component assurance cases along a product supply chain, and the respective SoSs that they support. It shows how assurance is a continuous process that spans product evolution through the monitoring of interdependent requirements and SPI. The interdependency necessary for a successful assurance case encourages stakeholders to identify and formally accept critical interconnections between related organizations. The resulting coordination promotes accountability for safety through increased awareness and the cultivation of a positive safety culture.
Authored by Uma Ferrell, Alfred Anderegg
The FAA proposes Safety Continuum that recognizes the public expectation for safety outcomes vary with aviation sectors that have different missions, aircraft, and environments. The purpose is to align the rigor of oversight to the public expectations. An aircraft, its variants or derivatives may be used in operations with different expectations. The differences in mission might bring immutable risks for some applications that reuse or revise the original aircraft type design. The continuum enables a more agile design approval process for innovations in the context of a dynamic ecosystems, addressing the creation of variants for different sectors and needs. Since an aircraft type design can be reused in various operations under part 91 or 135 with different mission risks the assurance case will have many branches reflecting the variants and derivatives.This paper proposes a model for the holistic, performance-based, through-life safety assurance case that focuses applicant and oversight alike on achieving the safety outcomes. This paper describes the application of goal-based, technology-neutral features of performance-based assurance cases extending the philosophy of UL 4600, to the Safety Continuum. This paper specifically addresses component reuse including third-party vehicle modifications and changes to operational concept or eco-system. The performance-based assurance argument offers a way to combine the design approval more seamlessly with the oversight functions by focusing all aspects of the argument and practice together to manage the safety outcomes. The model provides the context to assure mitigated risk are consistent with an operation’s place on the safety continuum, while allowing the applicant to reuse parts of the assurance argument to innovate variants or derivatives. The focus on monitoring performance to constantly verify the safety argument complements compliance checking as a way to assure products are "fit-for-use". The paper explains how continued operational safety becomes a natural part of monitoring the assurance case for growing variety in a product line by accounting for the ecosystem changes. Such a model could be used with the Safety Continuum to promote applicant and operator accountability delivering the expected safety outcomes.
Authored by Alfred Anderegg, Uma Ferrell
IoBTs must feature collaborative, context-aware, multi-modal fusion for real-time, robust decision-making in adversarial environments. The integration of machine learning (ML) models into IoBTs has been successful at solving these problems at a small scale (e.g., AiTR), but state-of-the-art ML models grow exponentially with increasing temporal and spatial scale of modeled phenomena, and can thus become brittle, untrustworthy, and vulnerable when interpreting large-scale tactical edge data. To address this challenge, we need to develop principles and methodologies for uncertainty-quantified neuro-symbolic ML, where learning and inference exploit symbolic knowledge and reasoning, in addition to, multi-modal and multi-vantage sensor data. The approach features integrated neuro-symbolic inference, where symbolic context is used by deep learning, and deep learning models provide atomic concepts for symbolic reasoning. The incorporation of high-level symbolic reasoning improves data efficiency during training and makes inference more robust, interpretable, and resource-efficient. In this paper, we identify the key challenges in developing context-aware collaborative neuro-symbolic inference in IoBTs and review some recent progress in addressing these gaps.
Authored by Tarek Abdelzaher, Nathaniel Bastian, Susmit Jha, Lance Kaplan, Mani Srivastava, Venugopal Veeravalli
Existing solutions for scheduling arbitrarily complex distributed applications on networks of computational nodes are insufficient for scenarios where the network topology is changing rapidly. New Internet of Things (IoT) domains like the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) and the Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT) demand solutions that are robust and efficient in environments that experience constant and/or rapid change. In this paper, we demonstrate how recent advancements in machine learning (in particular, in graph convolutional neural networks) can be leveraged to solve the task scheduling problem with decent performance and in much less time than traditional algorithms.
Authored by Jared Coleman, Mehrdad Kiamari, Lillian Clark, Daniel D'Souza, Bhaskar Krishnamachari
The latest generation of IoT systems incorporate machine learning (ML) technologies on edge devices. This introduces new engineering challenges to bring ML onto resource-constrained hardware, and complications for ensuring system security and privacy. Existing research prescribes iterative processes for machine learning enabled IoT products to ease development and increase product success. However, these processes mostly focus on existing practices used in other generic software development areas and are not specialized for the purpose of machine learning or IoT devices. This research seeks to characterize engineering processes and security practices for ML-enabled IoT systems through the lens of the engineering lifecycle. We collected data from practitioners through a survey (N=25) and interviews (N=4). We found that security processes and engineering methods vary by company. Respondents emphasized the engineering cost of security analysis and threat modeling, and trade-offs with business needs. Engineers reduce their security investment if it is not an explicit requirement. The threats of IP theft and reverse engineering were a consistent concern among practitioners when deploying ML for IoT devices. Based on our findings, we recommend further research into understanding engineering cost, compliance, and security trade-offs.
Authored by Nikhil Gopalakrishna, Dharun Anandayuvaraj, Annan Detti, Forrest Bland, Sazzadur Rahaman, James Davis
The prevalence of mobile devices (smartphones) along with the availability of high-speed internet access world-wide resulted in a wide variety of mobile applications that carry a large amount of confidential information. Although popular mobile operating systems such as iOS and Android constantly increase their defenses methods, data shows that the number of intrusions and attacks using mobile applications is rising continuously. Experts use techniques to detect malware before the malicious application gets installed, during the runtime or by the network traffic analysis. In this paper, we first present the information about different categories of mobile malware and threats; then, we classify the recent research methods on mobile malware traffic detection.
Authored by Mina Kambar, Armin Esmaeilzadeh, Yoohwan Kim, Kazem Taghva
The impact of digital gadgets is enormous in the current Internet world because of the easy accessibility, flexibility and time-saving benefits for the consumers. The number of computer users is increasing every year. Meanwhile, the time spent and the computers also increased. Computer users browse the internet for various information gathering and stay on the internet for a long time without control. Nowadays working people from home also spend time with the smart devices, computers, and laptops, for a longer duration to complete professional work, personal work etc. the proposed study focused on deriving the impact factors of Smartphones by analyzing the keystroke dynamics Based on the usage pattern of keystrokes the system evaluates the stress level detection using machine learning techniques. In the proposed study keyboard users are intended for testing purposes. Volunteers of 200 members are collectively involved in generating the test dataset. They are allowed to sit for a certain frame of time to use the laptop in the meanwhile the keystroke of the Mouse and keyboard are recorded. The system reads the dataset and trains the model using the Dynamic Cat-Boost algorithm (DCB), which acts as the classification model. The evaluation metrics are framed by calculating Euclidean distance (ED), Manhattan Distance (MahD), Mahalanobis distance (MD) etc. Quantitative measures of DCB are framed through Accuracy, precision and F1Score.
Authored by Bakkialakshmi S, T. Sudalaimuthu
Smart Phones being a revolution in this Modern era which is considered a boon as well as a curse, it is a known fact that most kids of the current generation are addictive to smartphones. The National Institute of Health (NIH) has carried out different studies such as exposure of smartphones to children under 12 years old, health risk associated with their usage, social implications, etc. One such study reveals that children who spend more than two hours a day, on smartphones have been seen performing poorly when it comes to language and cognitive skills. In addition, children who spend more than seven hours per day were diagnosed to have a thinner brain cortex. Hence, it is of great importance to control the amount of exposure of children to smartphones, as well as access to irregulated content. Significant research work has gone in this regard with a plethora of inputs features, feature extraction techniques, and machine learning models. This paper is a survey of the State-of-the-art techniques in detecting the age of the user using machine learning models on touch, keystroke dynamics, and sensor data.
Authored by Faheem H, Saad Sait
Malicious attacks, malware, and ransomware families pose critical security issues to cybersecurity, and it may cause catastrophic damages to computer systems, data centers, web, and mobile applications across various industries and businesses. Traditional anti-ransomware systems struggle to fight against newly created sophisticated attacks. Therefore, state-of-the-art techniques like traditional and neural network-based architectures can be immensely utilized in the development of innovative ransomware solutions. In this paper, we present a feature selection-based framework with adopting different machine learning algorithms including neural network-based architectures to classify the security level for ransomware detection and prevention. We applied multiple machine learning algorithms: Decision Tree (DT), Random Forest (RF), Naïve Bayes (NB), Logistic Regression (LR) as well as Neural Network (NN)-based classifiers on a selected number of features for ransomware classification. We performed all the experiments on one ransomware dataset to evaluate our proposed framework. The experimental results demonstrate that RF classifiers outperform other methods in terms of accuracy, F -beta, and precision scores.
Authored by Mohammad Masum, Md Faruk, Hossain Shahriar, Kai Qian, Dan Lo, Muhaiminul Adnan
This paper presents the machine learning algorithm to detect whether an executable binary is benign or ransomware. The ransomware cybercriminals have targeted our infrastructure, businesses, and everywhere which has directly affected our national security and daily life. Tackling the ransomware threats more effectively is a big challenge. We applied a machine-learning model to classify and identify the security level for a given suspected malware for ransomware detection and prevention. We use the feature selection data preprocessing to improve the prediction accuracy of the model.
Authored by Chulan Gao, Hossain Shahriar, Dan Lo, Yong Shi, Kai Qian
Ransomware is an emerging threat that imposed a \$ 5 billion loss in 2017, rose to \$ 20 billion in 2021, and is predicted to hit \$ 256 billion in 2031. While initially targeting PC (client) platforms, ransomware recently leaped over to server-side databases-starting in January 2017 with the MongoDB Apocalypse attack and continuing in 2020 with 85,000 MySQL instances ransomed. Previous research developed countermeasures against client-side ransomware. However, the problem of server-side database ransomware has received little attention so far. In our work, we aim to bridge this gap and present DIMAQS (Dynamic Identification of Malicious Query Sequences), a novel anti-ransomware solution for databases. DIMAQS performs runtime monitoring of incoming queries and pattern matching using two classification approaches (Colored Petri Nets (CPNs) and Deep Neural Networks (DNNs)) for attack detection. Our system design exhibits several novel techniques like dynamic color generation to efficiently detect malicious query sequences globally (i.e., without limiting detection to distinct user connections). Our proof-of-concept and ready-to-use implementation targets MySQL servers. The evaluation shows high efficiency without false negatives for both approaches and a false positive rate of nearly 0%. Both classifiers show very moderate performance overheads below 6%. We will publish our data sets and implementation, allowing the community to reproduce our tests and results.
Authored by Christoph Sendner, Lukas Iffländer, Sebastian Schindler, Michael Jobst, Alexandra Dmitrienko, Samuel Kounev