Android has become the leading mobile ecosystem because of its accessibility and adaptability. It has also become the primary target of widespread malicious apps. This situation needs the immediate implementation of an effective malware detection system. In this study, an explainable malware detection system was proposed using transfer learning and malware visual features. For effective malware detection, our technique leverages both textual and visual features. First, a pre-trained model called the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model was designed to extract the trained textual features. Second, the malware-to-image conversion algorithm was proposed to transform the network byte streams into a visual representation. In addition, the FAST (Features from Accelerated Segment Test) extractor and BRIEF (Binary Robust Independent Elementary Features) descriptor were used to efficiently extract and mark important features. Third, the trained and texture features were combined and balanced using the Synthetic Minority Over-Sampling (SMOTE) method; then, the CNN network was used to mine the deep features. The balanced features were then input into the ensemble model for efficient malware classification and detection. The proposed method was analyzed extensively using two public datasets, CICMalDroid 2020 and CIC-InvesAndMal2019. To explain and validate the proposed methodology, an interpretable artificial intelligence (AI) experiment was conducted.

Internet of Things (IoT) allows the integration of the physical world with network devices for proper privacy and security in a healthcare system. IoT in a healthcare system is vulnerable to spoofing attacks that can easily represent themselves as a legal entity of the network. It is a passive attack and can access the Medium Access Control address of some valid users in the network to continue malicious activities. In this paper, an algorithm is proposed for detecting spoofing attacks in IoT using Received Signal Strength (RSS) and Number of Connected Neighbors (NCN). Firstly, the spoofing attack is detected, located and eliminated through Received Signal Strength (RSS) in an inter-cluster network. However, the RSS is not useful against intra-cluster spoofing attacks and therefore the NCN is introduced to detect, identify and eliminate the intra-cluster spoofing attack. The proposed model is implemented in Network Simulator 2 (NS-2) to compare the performance of the proposed algorithm in the presence and absence of spoofing attacks. The result is that the proposed model increases the detection and prevention of spoofing.

Smart cities have experienced significant growth in recent years, transforming people’s lives into a more futuristic version. The smart city initiative includes a diverse collection of specifications, encompassing a large number of users whose requirements vary significantly and heterogeneously. Each device in smart cities generates a significant amount of data, which places a load on the gateways. Smart cities face a major challenge due to the enormous amount of data they generate. Through software-defined networking (SDN), network information paths are optimized, ensuring that traffic flow is evenly distributed across all network nodes. A considerable number of IoT devices with limited resources are susceptible to various security threats, such as device hijacking, ransomware, man-in-the-middle (MiM) attacks, and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. These threats can pose a severe challenge to network security. Additionally, DDoS attacks have disrupted web businesses, resulting in the loss of valuable data. To counter DDoS attacks in a smart city, several options exist, yet many challenges remain. This research presents a secure and intelligent system to combat DDoS attacks on smart cities. SDN security controllers and machine learning models with optimization are employed in this study to reduce the impact of common DDoS attacks on smart cities. This work utilizes an SDN based on security controllers and a detection mechanism rooted in a machine learning model with optimization to mitigate various types of prevalent DDoS attacks within smart cities. Employing binary classification, XGBoost achieved an accuracy of 99.99%, precision of 97%, recall of 99%, an F1 score of 98%, and a false-positive rate of 0.05. In multiclass classification, the average accuracy is 99.29%, precision is 97.7%, recall is 96.69%, and the F1 score is 97.51%. These results highlight the superiority of this approach over other existing machine learning techniques.

Organizations of every size and industry are facing a new normal. Adversaries have become more sophisticated and persistent than ever before. Every network is facing never-ending onslaughts. Yet many organizations continue to rely on signature-based reactive threat detection and mitigation solutions as the primary line of defense against new-age, cutting-edge attacks. Even conventional attacks can bypass such security solutions. This means legacy protection solutions leave the organization’s data vulnerable to damage, destruction, and theft. Adversarial attacks are like ocean waves: they are very persistent and keep coming like attack campaigns. Sometimes the waves, in our case, attacks, look the same, where indicators of compromise (IoCs) effectively detect the attacks, while sometimes, the waves or attacks change and continue to look different, especially over a while. If somehow the defenders can recognize what is making those attacks or waves and the conditions, then detecting threats and attacks can have a longer-lasting effect of success. This study focuses on the behavior and habits of the attackers that can provide better and long-lasting results when matching adversarial profiles instead of using just IoCs. The paper presents a unique framework for behavior-based structured threat hunting to deliver rapid, consistent remediation against emerging threats and malware on systems and networks.

The increase in internet connectivity has led to an increased usage of the Internet of Things (IoT) and devices on the internet. These IoT devices are becoming the backbone of Industry 4.0. The dependence on IoT devices has made them vulnerable to cyber-attacks. IoT devices are often deployed in harsh conditions, challenged with less computational costs, and starved with energy. All these limitations make it tough to deploy accurate intrusion detection systems (IDSs) in IoT devices and make the critical IoT ecosystem more susceptible to cyber-attacks. A new lightweight IDS and a novel feature selection algorithm are introduced in this paper to overcome the challenges of computational cost and accuracy. The proposed algorithm is based on the Information Theory models to select the feature with high statistical dependence and entropy reduction in the dataset. This feature selection algorithm also showed an increase in performance parameters and a reduction in training time of 27–63% with different classifiers. The proposed IDS with the algorithm showed accuracy, Precision, Recall, and F1-Score of more than 99% when tested with the CICIDS2018 dataset. The proposed IDS is competitive in accuracy, Precision, Recall, and training time compared to the latest published research. The proposed IDS showed consistent performance on the UNSWNB15 dataset.

The term IoT refers to the interconnection and exchange of data among devices/sensors. IoT devices are often small, low cost, and have limited resources. The IoT issues and challenges are growing increasingly. Security and privacy issues are among the most important concerns in IoT applications, such as smart buildings. Remote cybersecurity attacks are the attacks which do not require physical access to the IoT networks, where the attacker can remotely access and communicate with the IoT devices through a wireless communication channel. Thus, remote cybersecurity attacks are a significant threat. Emerging applications in smart environments such as smart buildings require remote access for both users and resources. Since the user/building communication channel is insecure, a lightweight and secure authentication protocol is required. In this paper, we propose a new secure remote user mutual authentication protocol based on transitory identities and multi-factor authentication for IoT smart building environment. The protocol ensures that only legitimate users can authenticate with smart building controllers in an anonymous, unlinkable, and untraceable manner. The protocol also avoids clock synchronization problem and can resist quantum computing attacks. The security of the protocol is evaluated using two different methods: (1) informal analysis; (2) model check using the automated validation of internet security protocols and applications (AVISPA) toolkit. The communication overhead and computational cost of the proposed are analyzed. The security and performance analysis show that our protocol is secure and efficient.