We propose several generalized linear models (GLMs) to predict the number of successful cyber intrusions (or "intrusions") into an organization's computer network, where the rate at which intrusions occur is a function of the following observable characteristics of the organization: (i) domain name server (DNS) traffic classified by their top-level domains (TLDs); (ii) the number of network security policy violations; and (iii) a set of predictors that we collectively call "cyber footprint" that is comprised of the number of hosts on the organization's network, the organization's similarity to educational institution behavior (SEIB), and its number of records on scholar.google.com (ROSG). In addition, we evaluate the number of intrusions to determine whether these events follow a Poisson or negative binomial (NB) probability distribution. We reveal that the NB GLM provides the best fit model for the observed count data, number of intrusions per organization, because the NB model allows the variance of the count data to exceed the mean. We also show that there are restricted and simpler NB regression models that omit selected predictors and improve the goodness-of-fit of the NB GLM for the observed data. With our model simulations, we identify certain TLDs in the DNS traffic as having significant impact on the number of intrusions. In addition, we use the models and regression results to conclude that the number of network security policy violations are consistently predictive of the number of intrusions.
There have been numerous works on network intrusion detection and prevention systems, but work on application layer intrusion detection and prevention is rare and not very mature. Intrusion detection and prevention at both network and application layers are important for cyber-security and enterprise system security. Since application layer intrusion is increasing day by day, it is imperative to give adequate attention to it and use state-of-the-art algorithms for effective detection and prevention. This paper talks about current state of application layer intrusion detection and prevention ca…
College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University（浙江大学计算机科学与技术学院）
As the number of cyber-attacks is increasing, cybersecurity is evolving to a key concern for any business. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) (in particular Deep Learning - DL) can be leveraged as key enabling technologies for cyber-defense, since they can contribute in threat detection and can even provide recommended actions to cyber analysts. A partnership of industry, academia, and government on a global scale is necessary in order to advance the adoption of AI/ML to cybersecurity and create efficient cyber defense systems. In this paper, we are concerned with the inves…
Intrusion detection has focused primarily on detecting cyberattacks at the event-level. Since there is such a large volume of network data and attacks are minimal, machine learning approaches have focused on improving accuracy and reducing false positives, but this has frequently resulted in overfitting. In addition, the volume of intrusion detection alerts is large and creates fatigue in the human analyst who must review them. This research addresses the problems associated with event-level intrusion detection and the large volumes of intrusion alerts by applying active learning and cyber sit…
Consistent and Compatible Modelling of Cyber Intrusions and Incident Response Demonstrated in the Context of Malware Attacks on Critical Infrastructure
Regular and uninterrupted operation of critical infrastructures such as power, transport, communication etc. are essential for proper functioning of a country. Cyber-attacks causing disruption in critical infrastructure service in the past, are considered as a significant threat. With the advancement in technology and the progress of the critical infrastructures towards IP based communication, cyber-physical systems are lucrative targets of the attackers. In this paper, we propose a robust multivariate intrusion detection system called RAD for detecting attacks in the cyber-physical systems in…
The extensive use of Information and Communication Technology in critical infrastructures such as Industrial Control Systems make them vulnerable to cyber-attacks. One particular class of cyber-attacks is advanced persistent threats where highly skilled attackers can steal user authentication information's and move in the network from host to host until a valuable target is reached. The detection of the attacker should occur as soon as possible in order to take appropriate response, otherwise the attacker will have enough time to reach sensitive assets. When facing intelligent threats, intelli…
The increasing interaction of industrial control systems (ICSs) with public networks and digital devices introduces new cyber threats to power systems and other critical infrastructure. Recent cyber-physical attacks such as Stuxnet and Irongate revealed unexpected ICS vulnerabilities and a need for improved security measures. Intrusion detection systems constitute a key security technology, which typically monitors cyber network data for detecting malicious activities. However, a central characteristic of modern ICSs is the increasing interdependency of physical and cyber network processes. Th…
The increase in scale of cyber networks and the rise in sophistication of cyber-attacks have introduced several challenges in intrusion detection. The primary challenge is the requirement to detect complex multi-stage attacks in realtime by processing the immense amount of traffic produced by present-day networks. In this paper we present PRISM, a hierarchical intrusion detection architecture that uses a novel attacker behavior model-based sampling technique to minimize the realtime traffic processing overhead. PRISM has a unique multi-layered architecture that monitors network traffic distrib…
College of Information Science, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA（信息科学学院，亚利桑那大学，图森，亚利桑那州，美国）
In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid deep learning architecture that synergistically combines Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), and multi-head attention mechanisms to significantly enhance cybersecurity intrusion detection capabilities. By leveraging the comprehensive UNSW-NB15 dataset containing diverse network traffic patterns, our approach effectively captures both spatial dependencies through graph structural relationships and temporal dynamics through sequential analysis of network events. The integrated attention mechanism provides dual benefits of impro…
The techniques and tactics used by cyber adversaries are becoming more sophisticated, ironically, as defense getting stronger and the cost of a breach continuing to rise. Understanding the thought processes and behaviors of adversaries is extremely challenging as high profile or even amateur attackers have no incentive to share the trades associated with their illegal activities. One opportunity to observe the actions the adversaries perform is through the use of Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) which generate alerts in the event that suspicious behavior was detected. The alerts raised by the…
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Institute for Network Sciences and Cyberspace, Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology, Tsinghua University（清华大学网络科学与网络空间研究院，北京信息科学与技术国家研究中心）
Learning-based Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDSs) are widely deployed for defending various cyberattacks. Existing learning-based NIDS mainly uses Neural Network (NN) as a classifier that relies on the quality and quantity of cyberattack data. Such NN-based approaches are also hard to interpret for improving efficiency and scalability. In this paper, we design a new local-global computation paradigm, FEDFOREST, a novel learning-based NIDS by combining the interpretable Gradient Boosting Decision Tree (GBDT) and Federated Learning (FL) framework. Specifically, FEDFOREST is composed of …
University of North Texas（北德克萨斯大学）；Tuskegee University（塔斯基吉大学）
Intrusion detection is an essential task in the cyber threat environment. Machine learning and deep learning techniques have been applied for intrusion detection. However, most of the existing research focuses on the model work but ignores the fact that poor data quality has a direct impact on the performance of a machine learning system. More attention should be paid to the data work when building a machine learning-based intrusion detection system. This article first summarizes existing machine learning-based intrusion detection systems and the datasets used for building these systems. Then …
Cybersecurity is a domain where the data distribution is constantly changing with attackers exploring newer patterns to attack cyber infrastructure. Intrusion detection system is one of the important layers in cyber safety in today's world. Machine learning based network intrusion detection systems started showing effective results in recent years. With deep learning models, detection rates of network intrusion detection system are improved. More accurate the model, more the complexity and hence less the interpretability. Deep neural networks are complex and hard to interpret which makes diffi…
Montclair State University（蒙特克莱尔州立大学）；Stevens Institute of Technology（史蒂文斯理工学院）；Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）
Cyber attacks pose crucial threats to computer system security, and put digital treasuries at excessive risks. This leads to an urgent call for an effective intrusion detection system that can identify the intrusion attacks with high accuracy. It is challenging to classify the intrusion events due to the wide variety of attacks. Furthermore, in a normal network environment, a majority of the connections are initiated by benign behaviors. The class imbalance issue in intrusion detection forces the classifier to be biased toward the majority/benign class, thus leave many attack incidents undetec…
Data-intensive applications exhibit increasing reliance on Database Management Systems (DBMSs, for short). With the growing cyber-security threats to government and commercial infrastructures, the need to develop high resilient cyber systems is becoming increasingly important. Cyber-attacks on DBMSs include intrusion attacks that may result in severe degradation in performance. Several efforts have been directed towards designing an integrated management system to detect, respond, and recover from malicious attacks. In this paper, we propose a data Partitioning-based Intrusion Management Syste…
The incremental diffusion of machine learning algorithms in supporting cybersecurity is creating novel defensive opportunities but also new types of risks. Multiple researches have shown that machine learning methods are vulnerable to adversarial attacks that create tiny perturbations aimed at decreasing the effectiveness of detecting threats. We observe that existing literature assumes threat models that are inappropriate for realistic cybersecurity scenarios because they consider opponents with complete knowledge about the cyber detector or that can freely interact with the target systems. B…
AI-Driven Chatbot for Intrusion Detection in Edge Networks: Enhancing Cybersecurity with Ethical User Consent
School of Computer Science, University of Galway（戈尔韦大学计算机科学学院）；Faculty of Information Technology and Computer Science, University of Central Punjab（旁遮普中央大学信息技术与计算机科学学院）
Recreating cyber-attack alert data with a high level of fidelity is challenging due to the intricate interaction between features, non-homogeneity of alerts, and potential for rare yet critical samples. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have been shown to effectively learn complex data distributions with the intent of creating increasingly realistic data. This paper presents the application of GANs to cyber-attack alert data and shows that GANs not only successfully learn to generate realistic alerts, but also reveal feature dependencies within alerts. This is accomplished by reviewing th…
Many modern datasets can be represented as graphs and hence spectral decompositions such as graph principal component analysis (PCA) can be useful. Distinct from previous graph decomposition approaches based on subspace projection of a single topological feature, e.g., the Fiedler vector of centered graph adjacency matrix (graph Laplacian), we propose spectral decomposition approaches to graph PCA and graph dictionary learning that integrate multiple features, including graph walk statistics, centrality measures and graph distances to reference nodes. In this paper we propose a new PCA method …
Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) are a necessary cyber defense mechanism. Unfortunately, their capability has fallen behind that of attackers. This motivates us to improve our understanding of the root causes of their false-negatives. In this paper we make a first step towards the ultimate goal of drawing useful insights and principles that can guide the design of next-generation IDSs. Specifically, we propose a methodology for analyzing the root causes of IDS false-negatives and conduct a case study based on Snort and a real-world dataset of cyber attacks. The case study allows us to draw u…
North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University（北卡罗来纳农业技术州立大学）
In the realm of cybersecurity, intrusion detection systems (IDS) detect and prevent attacks based on collected computer and network data. In recent research, IDS models have been constructed using machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) methods such as Random Forest (RF) and deep neural networks (DNN). Feature selection (FS) can be used to construct faster, more interpretable, and more accurate models. We look at three different FS techniques; RF information gain (RF-IG), correlation feature selection using the Bat Algorithm (CFS-BA), and CFS using the Aquila Optimizer (CFS-AO). Our resul…
The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；University of Ottawa（渥太华大学）
The high volume of increasingly sophisticated cyber threats is drawing growing attention to cybersecurity, where many challenges remain unresolved. Namely, for intrusion detection, new algorithms that are more robust, effective, and able to use more information are needed. Moreover, the intrusion detection task faces a serious challenge associated with the extreme class imbalance between normal and malicious traffics. Recently, graph-neural network (GNN) achieved state-of-the-art performance to model the network topology in cybersecurity tasks. However, only a few works exist using GNNs to tac…
Over the past decade, industrial control systems have experienced a massive integration with information technologies. Industrial networks have undergone numerous technical transformations to protect operational and production processes, leading today to a new industrial revolution. Information Technology tools are not able to guarantee confidentiality, integrity and availability in the industrial domain, therefore it is of paramount importance to understand the interaction of the physical components with the networks. For this reason, usually, the industrial control systems are an example of …
Toward Autonomous and Efficient Cybersecurity: A Multi-Objective AutoML-based Intrusion Detection System
Faculty of Business and Information Technology, Ontario Tech University（业务与信息科技学院，安大略技术大学）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Western University（电气与计算机工程系，西部大学）
Explainable AI-Driven Cyber Risk Analytics and Model Reliability Assessment for Intelligent Governance of U.S. Critical Infrastructure: An XGBoost and SHAP-Based Intrusion Detection Framework
Department of Business Information Systems, Central Michigan University（中央密歇根大学商业信息系统系）；Department of Information Studies, Trine University（特林大学信息学系）；Department of Computer Science, Maharishi International University（Maharishi国际大学计算机科学系）
Modern Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition SCADA systems used by the electric utility industry to monitor and control electric power generation, transmission and distribution are recognized today as critical components of the electric power delivery infrastructure. SCADA systems are large, complex and incorporate increasing numbers of widely distributed components. The presence of a real time intrusion detection mechanism, which can cope with different types of attacks, is of great importance, in order to defend a system against cyber attacks This defense mechanism must be distributed, ch…
Howard University（霍华德大学）；African Institute for Mathematical Sciences（非洲数学科学研究所）
With the growing rates of cyber-attacks and cyber espionage, the need for better and more powerful intrusion detection systems (IDS) is even more warranted nowadays. The basic task of an IDS is to act as the first line of defense, in detecting attacks on the internet. As intrusion tactics from intruders become more sophisticated and difficult to detect, researchers have started to apply novel Machine Learning (ML) techniques to effectively detect intruders and hence preserve internet users' information and overall trust in the entire internet network security. Over the last decade, there has b…
Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDSs) are widely regarded as efficient tools for securing in-vehicle networks against diverse cyberattacks. However, since cyberattacks are always evolving, signature-based intrusion detection systems are no longer adopted. An alternative solution can be the deployment of deep learning based intrusion detection system which play an important role in detecting unknown attack patterns in network traffic. Hence, in this paper, we compare the performance of different unsupervised deep and machine learning based anomaly detection algorithms, for real-time detec…
In the scenarios of specific conditions and crises such as the coronavirus pandemic, the availability of e-learning ecosystem elements is further highlighted. The growing importance for securing such an ecosystem can be seen from DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks on e-learning components of the Croatian e-learning system. The negative impact of the conducted attack is visible in numerous users who were prevented from participating in and implementing the planned teaching process. Network anomalies such as conducted DDoS attacks were identified as one of the crucial threats to the e-…
Ubiquitous anomalies endanger the security of our system constantly. They may bring irreversible damages to the system and cause leakage of privacy. Thus, it is of vital importance to promptly detect these anomalies. Traditional supervised methods such as Decision Trees and Support Vector Machine (SVM) are used to classify normality and abnormality. However, in some case the abnormal status are largely rarer than normal status, which leads to decision bias of these methods. Generative adversarial network (GAN) has been proposed to handle the case. With its strong generative ability, it only ne…
This paper identifies an intrusion surveillance framework which provides an analyst with the ability to investigate and monitor cyber-attacks in a covert manner. Where cyber-attacks are perpetrated for the purposes of espionage the ability to understand an adversary's techniques and objectives are an important element in network and computer security. With the appropriate toolset, security investigators would be permitted to perform both live and stealthy counter-intelligence operations by observing the behaviour and communications of the intruder. Subsequently a more complete picture of the a…
Machine Learning-Based Cyber Defense for Cloud Infrastructure: An Adaptive Deep Q-Network Architecture for Intelligent Intrusion Detection and Automated Threat Mitigation
Wilmington University（威尔明顿大学）；Washington University of Science and Technology（华盛顿科技大学）；South Dakota School of Mines & Technology（南达科他矿业理工学院）；South Dakota State University（南达科他州立大学）；St. Francis College（圣弗朗西斯学院）；Stanton University（斯坦顿大学）
Cyber attacks constitute a significant threat to organizations with implications ranging from economic, reputational, and legal consequences. As cybercriminals' techniques get sophisticated, information security professionals face a more significant challenge to protecting information systems. In today's interconnected realm of computer systems, each attack vector has a network dimension. The present study investigates network intrusion attempts with anomaly-based machine learning models to provide better protection than the conventional misuse-based models. Two models, namely an ensemble lear…
