The proliferation in Internet of Things (IoT) devices, which routinely collect sensitive information, is demonstrated by their prominence in our daily lives. Although such devices simplify and automate every day tasks, they also introduce tremendous security flaws. Current insufficient security measures employed to defend smart devices make IoT the ‘weakest’ link to breaking into a secure infrastructure, and therefore an attractive target to attackers. This paper proposes a three layer Intrusion Detection System (IDS) that uses a supervised approach to detect a range of popular network based cyber-attacks on IoT networks. The system consists of three main functions: 1) classify the type and profile the normal behaviour of each IoT device connected to the network, 2) identifies malicious packets on the network when an attack is occurring, and 3) classifies the type of the attack that has been deployed. The system is evaluated within a smart home testbed consisting of 8 popular commercially available devices. The effectiveness of the proposed IDS architecture is evaluated by deploying 12 attacks from 4 main network based attack categories such as: Denial of Service (DoS), Man-In-The-Middle (MITM)/Spoofing, Reconnaissance, and Replay. Additionally, the system is also evaluated against 4 scenarios of multi-stage attacks with complex chains of events. The performance of the system’s three core functions result in an F-measure of: 1) 96.2%, 2) 90.0%, and 3) 98.0%. This demonstrates that the proposed architecture can automatically distinguish between IoT devices on the network, whether network activity is malicious or benign, and detect which attack was deployed on which device connected to the network successfully.

This paper investigates the use of gamification and game-based learning in the field of cybersecurity education. Due to their technical complexity and lack of coherence, traditional pedagogical methods, such as lectures, may fail to engage and inspire students, especially those from non-cyber backgrounds. To address this issue, we devised two distinct cybersecurity frameworks/games based on traditional Capture The Flag (CTF) competitions; an open-ended CTF event and a story-based CTF. Such games have demonstrated potential across multiple disciplines, including computer science, physics, mathematics, and engineering, as well as across multiple levels of study including undergraduate and postgraduate students. The positive feedback and significant increase in the interest to pursue a postgraduate course in cybersecurity, especially among non-cybersecurity students, attest to the success of this gamification strategy. As such, this paper provides valuable insights for enhancing the attractiveness and efficacy of cybersecurity education, thereby encouraging a broader spectrum of non-technical and non-cybersecurity students to pursue this crucial field.

In this paper we describe an automated approach to enriching sentiment analysis with idiom—based features. Specifically, we automated the development of the supporting lexico—semantic resources, which include (1) a set of rules used to identify idioms in text and (2) their sentiment polarity classifications. Our method demonstrates how idiom dictionaries, which are readily available general pedagogical resources, can be adapted into purpose—specific computational resources automatically. These resources were then used to replace the manually engineered counterparts in an existing system, which originally outperformed the baseline sentiment analysis approaches by 17 percentage points on average, taking the F—measure from 40s into 60s. The new fully automated approach outperformed the baselines by 8 percentage points on average taking the F—measure from 40s into 50s. Although the latter improvement is not as high as the one achieved with the manually engineered features, it has got the advantage of being more general in a sense that it can readily utilize an arbitrary list of idioms without the knowledge acquisition overhead previously associated with this task, thereby fully automating the original approach.

With the increase in the adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, the security threat they face has become more pervasive. Recent research has demonstrated that most IoT devices are insecure and vulnerable to a range of cyber attacks. The impact of such attacks can vary significantly, from affecting the service of the device itself to putting their owners and their personal information at risk. As a response to improving their security, the focus has been on attacks, specifically on the network layer. However, the importance and impact of other vulnerabilities, such as low-level Radio Frequency (RF) attacks, have been neglected. Such attacks are challenging to detect, and they can be deployed using non-expensive equipment and can cause significant damage. This paper explores security vulnerabilities that target RF communications on popular commercial IoT devices such as Wi-Fi, Zigbee, and 433 Mz. Using software-defined radio, a range of attacks were deployed against the devices, including jamming, replay attacks, packet manipulation, protocol reverse engineering, and harmonic frequency attacks. The results demonstrated that all devices used were susceptible to jamming attacks, and in some cases, they were rendered inoperable and required a hard reset to function correctly again. This finding highlights the lack of protection against both intentional and unintentional jamming. In addition, all devices demonstrated that they were susceptible to replay attacks, which highlights the need for more hardened security measures. Finally, this paper discusses proposals for defence mechanisms for enhancing the security of IoT devices against the aforementioned attacks.

Topic modelling is a text mining technique for identifying salient themes from a number of documents. The output is commonly a set of topics consisting of isolated tokens that often co-occur in such documents. Manual effort is often associated with interpreting a topic’s description from such tokens. However, from a human’s perspective, such outputs may not adequately provide enough information to infer the meaning of the topics; thus, their interpretability is often inaccurately understood. Although several studies have attempted to automatically extend topic descriptions as a means of enhancing the interpretation of topic models, they rely on external language sources that may become unavailable, must be kept up to date to generate relevant results, and present privacy issues when training on or processing data. This paper presents a novel approach towards extending the output of traditional topic modelling methods beyond a list of isolated tokens. This approach removes the dependence on external sources by using the textual data themselves by extracting high-scoring keywords and mapping them to the topic model’s token outputs. To compare how the proposed method benchmarks against the state of the art, a comparative analysis against results produced by Large Language Models (LLMs) is presented. Such results report that the proposed method resonates with the thematic coverage found in LLMs and often surpasses such models by bridging the gap between broad thematic elements and granular details. In addition, to demonstrate and reinforce the generalisation of the proposed method, the approach was further evaluated using two other topic modelling methods as the underlying models and when using a heterogeneous unseen dataset. To measure the interpretability of the proposed outputs against those of the traditional topic modelling approach, independent annotators manually scored each output based on their quality and usefulness as well as the efficiency of the annotation task. The proposed approach demonstrated higher quality and usefulness, as well as higher efficiency in the annotation task, in comparison to the outputs of a traditional topic modelling method, demonstrating an increase in their interpretability.