Although cloud computing is considered the most widespread technology nowadays, it still suffers from many challenges, especially related to its security. Due to the open and distributed nature of the cloud environment, this makes the cloud itself vulnerable to various attacks. In this paper, the design of a novel integrated Cloud-based Intrusion Detection System (CIDS) is proposed to immunise the cloud against any possible attacks. The proposed CIDS consists of five main modules to do the following actions: monitoring the network, capturing the traffic flows, extracting features, analyzing the flows, detecting intrusions, taking a reaction, and logging all activities. Furthermore an enhanced bagging ensemble system of three deep learning models is utilized to predict intrusions effectively. Moreover, a third-party Cloud-based Intrusion Detection System Service (CIDSS) is also exploited to control the proposed CIDS and provide the reporting service. Finally, it has been shown that the proposed approach overcomes all problems associated with attacks on the cloud raised in the literature.

Early and accurate fault detection in electrical power grids is a very essential research area because of its positive influence on network stability and customer satisfaction. Although many electrical fault detection techniques have been introduced during the past decade, the existence of an effective and robust fault detection system is still rare in real-world applications. Moreover, one of the main challenges that delays the progress in this direction is the severe lack of reliable data for system validation. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel anomaly-based electrical fault detection system which is consistent with the concept of faults in the electrical power grids. It benefits from two phases prior to training phase, namely, data preprocessing and pretraining. While the data preprocessing phase executes all elementary operations on the raw data, the pretraining phase selects the optimal hyperparameters of the model using a particle swarm optimization (PSO)-based algorithm. Furthermore, the one-class support vector machines (OC-SVMs) and the principal component analysis (PCA) anomaly-based detection models are exploited to validate the proposed system on the VSB dataset which is a modern and realistic electrical fault detection dataset. Finally, the results are thoroughly discussed using several quantitative and statistical analyses. The experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed system in improving the detection of electrical faults.

In computer security, masquerade detection is a special type of intrusion detection problem. Effective and early intrusion detection is a crucial factor for computer security. Although considerable work has been focused on masquerade detection for more than a decade, achieving a high level of accuracy and a comparatively low false alarm rate is still a big challenge. In this paper, we present a comprehensive empirical study in the area of anomaly-based masquerade detection using three deep learning models, namely, Deep Neural Networks (DNN), Long Short-Term Memory Recurrent Neural Networks (LSTM-RNN), and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). In order to surpass previous studies on this subject, we used three UNIX command line-based datasets, with six variant data configurations implemented from them. Furthermore, static and dynamic masquerade detection approaches were utilized in this study. In a static approach, DNN and LSTM-RNN models are used along with a Particle Swarm Optimization-based algorithm for their hyperparameters selection. On the other hand, a CNN model is employed in a dynamic approach. Moreover, twelve well-known evaluation metrics are used to assess model performance in each of the data configurations. Finally, intensive quantitative and ROC curves analyses of results are provided at the end of this paper. The results not only show that deep learning models outperform all traditional machine learning methods in the literature but also prove their ability to enhance masquerade detection on the used datasets significantly.