One of the major challenges in cybersecurity is the provision of an automated and effective cyber-threats detection technique. In this paper, we present an AI technique for cyber-threats detection, based on artificial neural networks. The proposed technique converts multitude of collected security events to individual event profiles and use a deep learning-based detection method for enhanced cyber-threat detection. For this work, we developed an AI-SIEM system based on a combination of event profiling for data preprocessing and different artificial neural network methods, including FCNN, CNN, and LSTM. The system focuses on discriminating between true positive and false positive alerts, thus helping security analysts to rapidly respond to cyber threats. All experiments in this study are performed by authors using two benchmark datasets (NSLKDD and CICIDS2017) and two datasets collected in the real world. To evaluate the performance comparison with existing methods, we conducted experiments using the five conventional machine-learning methods (SVM, k-NN, RF, NB, and DT). Consequently, the experimental results of this study ensure that our proposed methods are capable of being employed as learning-based models for network intrusion-detection, and show that although it is employed in the real world, the performance outperforms the conventional machine-learning methods.
1 March 2023 in IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management
While a body of studies has been carried out for malware detection with its significance, they are often limited to known malware patterns due to the reliance on signature-based or supervised learning approaches. The semi-supervised learning approach would be an option for identifying previously unseen patterns (i.e., zero-day detection); however, our preliminary study reveals critical limitations from existing methods, including (i) the profiling-based approach using an autoencoder can provide better detection but is sensitive to the threshold setting, and (ii) one-class (OC) classification does not require a manual threshold discovery but may be limited with low detection rates. In this paper, we present a new detection method incorporating the concept of autoencoding and OC classification, designed to benefit from strong abstraction by neural networks (using an autoencoder) and the removal of the complex threshold selection (using an OC classifier). For this combined architecture, a challenge is concurrent training of the autoencoder and the OC classifier, which may cause an ill-suited learner due to no reference to malware instances. To this end, we introduce a new model selection method that discovers well-optimized models from a variety of combinations. The experimental results performed with public malware datasets (Meraz’18 and Drebin) show the effectiveness of our presented methods with up to 97.1% accuracy, comparable to the supervised learning-based detection. We also examine the impact of evading attacks using adversarial attack tools, the result of which shows resilience to malware variants with over 99% detection rates.
Every day, hundreds of thousands of malicious files are created to exploit zero-day vulnerabilities. Existing pattern-based antivirus solutions face difficulties in coping with such a large number of new malicious files. To solve this problem, artificial intelligence (AI)-based malicious file detection methods have been proposed. However, even if we can detect malicious files with high accuracy using deep learning, it is difficult to identify why files are malicious. In this study, we propose a malicious file feature extraction method based on attention mechanism. First, by adapting the attention mechanism, we can identify application program interface (API) system calls that are more important than others for determining whether a file is malicious. Second, we confirm that this approach yields an accuracy that is approximately 12% and 5% higher than a conventional AI-based detection model using convolutional neural networks and skip-connected long short-term memory-based detection model, respectively.
With a plethora of new connections, features, and services introduced, the 5th generation (5G) wireless technology represents a significant advancement of mobile communication networks and is expected to remain prominent for the next decade. The multitude of services and technologies that 5G incorporates has made modern communication networks very complex and sophisticated in nature. This complexity along with the incorporation of Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) provides the opportunity for attackers to launch intelligent attacks against the network and network devices. These attacks often go undetected due to the lack of intelligent security mechanisms to counter these threats. Therefore, the implementation of real-time, proactive, and self-adaptive security mechanisms throughout the network would be an integral part of 5G as well as future communication systems. Therefore, large amounts of data collected from real networks will play an important role in the training of AI/ML models to identify and detect malicious content in network traffic. This work presents 5G-NIDD, a fully labeled dataset built on a functional 5G test network that can be used by those who develop and test AI/ML solutions. The work further analyses the collected data using common ML models and shows the achieved accuracy levels.
Location spoofing is a critical attack in mobile communications. While several previous studies investigated the detection of location spoofing attacks, they are limited in their performance and lack the consideration of emerging attack variations. In this paper, we present a data-driven methodology for the reliable detection of location spoofing and its variations. To enhance the performance, we introduce and utilize a new set of features, which is differential in nature and enables the checking of the mobility constraints and inconsistency. Our comparison study with the previous research shows that the presented scheme using the new features significantly improves the accuracy and reliability of the detection against location spoofing attacks. To take the possibility of attack variations into account, we establish a set of scenarios manipulating coordinate data to create attack variants. Our experimental results confirm the feasibility and effectiveness of the new features for identifying diverse types of spoofing attacks and their variations, greatly improving the detection performance by up to 99.1% accuracy. Additionally, we present a profiling-based detection approach (building the detector referring only to legitimate coordinate data), to further extend resilience to previously unseen attacks as a means to zero-day detection. The evaluation result shows the potential of the profiling-based detector with comparable or even better performance than the supervised learning methods (requiring both legitimate and falsified data to construct the detector).
Cyberattacks are often difficult to identify with traditional signature‐based detection, because attackers continually find ways to bypass the detection methods. Therefore, researchers have introduce...