Fog computing is a paradigm that extends cloud computing and services to the edge of the network in order to address the inherent problems of the cloud, such as latency and lack of mobility support and location-awareness. The fog is a decentralized platform capable of operating and processing data locally and can be installed in heterogeneous hardware which makes it ideal for Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) are an integral part of any security system for fog and IoT networks to ensure the quality of service. Due to the resource limitations of fog and IoT devices, lightweight IDS is highly desirable. In this paper, we present a lightweight IDS based on a vector space representation using a Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) model. We evaluated the presented IDS against the Australian Defense Force Academy Linux Dataset (ADFA-LD) and Australian Defense Force Academy Windows Dataset (ADFA-WD), which are new generation system calls datasets that contain exploits and attacks on various applications. The simulation shows that by using a single hidden layer and a small number of nodes, we are able to achieve a 94% Accuracy, 95% Recall, and 92% F1-Measure in ADFA-LD and 74% Accuracy, 74% Recall, and 74% F1-Measure in ADFA-WD. The performance is evaluated using a Raspberry Pi.

In this article, a Host-Based Intrusion Detection System (HIDS) using a Modified Vector Space Representation (MVSR) N-gram and Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) model for securing the Internet of Things (IoT), based on lightweight techniques and using Fog Computing devices, is proposed. The Australian Defence Force Academy Linux Dataset (ADFA-LD), which contains exploits and attacks on various applications, is employed for the analysis. The proposed method is divided into the feature extraction stage, the feature selection stage, and classification modeling. To maintain the lightweight criteria, the feature extraction stage considers a combination of 1-gram and 2-gram for the system call encoding. In addition, a Sparse Matrix is used to reduce the space by keeping only the weight of the features that appear in the trace, thus ignoring the zero weights. Subsequently, Linear Correlation Coefficient (LCC) is utilized to compensate for any missing N-gram in the test data. In the feature selection stage, the Mutual Information (MI) method and Principle Component Analysis (PCA) are utilized and then compared to reduce the number of input features. Following the feature selection stage, the modeling and performance evaluation of various Machine Learning classifiers are conducted using a Raspberry Pi IoT device. Further analysis of the effect of MLP parameters, such as the number of nodes, number of features, activation, solver, and regularization parameters, is also conducted. From the simulation, it can be seen that different parameters affect the accuracy and lightweight evaluation. By using a single hidden layer and four nodes, the proposed method with MI can achieve 96% accuracy, 97% recall, 96% F1-Measure, 5% False Positive Rate (FPR), highest curve of Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC), and 96% Area Under the Curve (AUC). It also achieved low CPU time usage of 4.404 (ms) milliseconds and low energy consumption of 8.809 (mj) millijoules.

Malware applications (Apps) targeting mobile devices are widespread, and compromise the sensitive and private information stored on the devices. This is due to the asymmetry between informative permissions and irrelevant and redundant permissions for benign Apps. It also depends on the characteristics of the Android platform, such as adopting an open-source policy, supporting unofficial App stores, and the great tolerance for App verification; therefore the Android platform is destined to face such malicious intrusions. In this paper, we propose a permissions-based malware detection system (PerDRaML) that determines the App’s maliciousness based on the usage of suspicious permissions. The system uses a multi-level based methodology; we first extract and identify the significant features such as permissions, smali sizes, and permission rates from a manually collected dataset of 10,000 applications. Further, we employ various machine learning models to categorize the Apps into their malicious or benign categories. Through extensive experimentations, the proposed method successfully identifies the 5× most significant features to predict malicious Apps. The proposed method outperformed the existing techniques by achieving high accuracies of malware detection i.e., 89.7% with Support Vector Machine, 89.96% with Random Forest, 86.25% with Rotation Forest, and 89.52% with Naïve Bayes models. Moreover, the proposed method optimized up to ~77% of the feature set as compared to the recent approaches, while improving the evaluation metrics such as precision, sensitivity, accuracy, and F-measure. The experimental results show that the proposed system provides a high level of symmetry between irrelevant permissions and malware Apps. Further, the proposed system is promising and may provide a low-cost alternative for Android malware detection for malicious or repackaged Apps.

Steganography is the art and practice of communication using hidden messages. The least significant bits (LSB) based method is the well-known type of steganography in the spatial domain. Usually, achieving the larger embedding capacity in LSB-based methods requires a large number of LSB bits modification which indirectly reduces the visual quality of stego-image and increases the risk of steganalysis detection attacks. In this study, we propose a novel steganography method with data mapping strategy which can reduce the number of bits modification per pixel. In the proposed method, four secret data bits are mapped with the four most significant bits of a cover pixel. Furthermore, the only two LSBs of a pixel are modified to indicate the mapping strategy. Experimental results show that the proposed method is able to achieve 3.48% larger embedding capacity while enhancing the visual quality (i.e., peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) 3.73 dB) and reducing the modification of 0.76 bits per pixel. Moreover, the proposed method provides security against basic Regular and Singular groups (RS) steganalysis and histogram steganalysis detection attacks.

Realizing the full potential of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) highlights many design issues, particularly the trade-offs concerning multiple conflicting improvements such as maximizing the route overlapping for efficient data aggregation and minimizing the total link cost. While the issues of data aggregation routing protocols and link cost function in a WSNs have been comprehensively considered in the literature, a trade-off improvement between these two has not yet been addressed. In this paper, a comprehensive weight for trade-off between different objectives has been employed, the so-called weighted data aggregation routing strategy (WDARS) which aims to maximize the overlap routes for efficient data aggregation and link cost issues in cluster-based WSNs simultaneously. The proposed methodology is evaluated for energy consumption, network lifetime, throughput, and packet delivery ratio and compared with the InFRA and DRINA. These protocols are cluster-based routing protocols which only aim to maximize the overlap routes for efficient data aggregation. Analysis and simulation results revealed that the WDARS delivered a longer network lifetime with more proficient and reliable performance over other methods.