Iftikhar Ahmad

Prof. Dr. Iftikhar Ahmad

Department of Information Technology, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Makkah al Mukarramah, Saudi Arabia
orcid

Research Focus & Metrics

Academic Career Length

9Years (2018-Present)

(Calculated once Scilit publication data is synced: current year − year of first publication + 1)

Representative Publications

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30 May 2018 in IEEE Access
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
Iftikhar AhmadIftikhar Ahmad
Iftikhar Ahmad
MBMohammad Basheri
Mohammad Basheri
MIMuhammad Javed Iqbal
Muhammad Javed Iqbal
ARAneel Rahim
Aneel Rahim
Intrusion detection is a fundamental part of security tools, such as adaptive security appliances, intrusion detection systems, intrusion prevention systems, and firewalls. Various intrusion detection techniques are used, but their performance is an issue. Intrusion detection performance depends on accuracy, which needs to improve to decrease false alarms and to increase the detection rate. To resolve concerns on performance, multilayer perceptron, support vector machine (SVM), and other techniques have been used in recent work. Such techniques indicate limitations and are not efficient for use in large data sets, such as system and network data. The intrusion detection system is used in analyzing huge traffic data; thus, an efficient classification technique is necessary to overcome the issue. This problem is considered in this paper. Well-known machine learning techniques, namely, SVM, random forest, and extreme learning machine (ELM) are applied. These techniques are well-known because of their capability in classification. The NSL–knowledge discovery and data mining data set is used, which is considered a benchmark in the evaluation of intrusion detection mechanisms. The results indicate that ELM outperforms other approaches.

5 March 2020 in IEEE Access
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
Neelum NoreenNeelum Noreen
Neelum Noreen
SPSellappan Palaniappan
Sellappan Palaniappan
AQAbdul Qayyum
Abdul Qayyum
Iftikhar AhmadIftikhar Ahmad
Iftikhar Ahmad
MIMuhammad Imran
Muhammad Imran
MSMuhammad Shoaib
Muhammad Shoaib
Brain tumor is a deadly disease and its classification is a challenging task for radiologists because of the heterogeneous nature of the tumor cells. Recently, computer-aided diagnosis-based systems have promised, as an assistive technology, to diagnose the brain tumor, through magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). In recent applications of pre-trained models, normally features are extracted from bottom layers which are different from natural images to medical images. To overcome this problem, this study proposes a method of multi-level features extraction and concatenation for early diagnosis of brain tumor. Two pre-trained deep learning models i.e. Inception-v3 and DensNet201 make this model valid. With the help of these two models, two different scenarios of brain tumor detection and its classification were evaluated. First, the features from different Inception modules were extracted from pre-trained Inception-v3 model and concatenated these features for brain tumor classification. Then, these features were passed to softmax classifier to classify the brain tumor. Second, pre-trained DensNet201 was used to extract features from various DensNet blocks. Then, these features were concatenated and passed to softmax classifier to classify the brain tumor. Both scenarios were evaluated with the help of three-class brain tumor dataset that is available publicly. The proposed method produced 99.34 %, and 99.51% testing accuracies respectively with Inception-v3 and DensNet201 on testing samples and achieved highest performance in the detection of brain tumor. As results indicated, the proposed method based on features concatenation using pre-trained models outperformed as compared to existing state-of-the-art deep learning and machine learning based methods for brain tumor classification.

2 November 2022 in Sensors
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Journal Article
Open access
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ABalaa Mohammed BANAAMAH
alaa Mohammed BANAAMAH
Iftikhar AhmadIftikhar Ahmad
Iftikhar Ahmad
Cybersecurity has been widely used in various applications, such as intelligent industrial systems, homes, personal devices, and cars, and has led to innovative developments that continue to face challenges in solving problems related to security methods for IoT devices. Effective security methods, such as deep learning for intrusion detection, have been introduced. Recent research has focused on improving deep learning algorithms for improved security in IoT. This research explores intrusion detection methods implemented using deep learning, compares the performance of different deep learning methods, and identifies the best method for implementing intrusion detection in IoT. This research is conducted using deep learning models based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs), long short-term memory (LSTM), and gated recurrent units (GRUs). A standard dataset for intrusion detection in IoT is considered to evaluate the proposed model. Finally, the empirical results are analyzed and compared with the existing approaches for intrusion detection in IoT. The proposed method seemed to have the highest accuracy compared to the existing methods.

5 November 2024 in Applied Sciences
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Journal Article
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EQEmad Ul Haq Qazi
Emad Ul Haq Qazi
MFMuhammad Hamza Faheem
Muhammad Hamza Faheem
Iftikhar AhmadIftikhar Ahmad
Iftikhar Ahmad
Phishing is one of the most widely observed types of internet cyber-attack, through which hundreds of clients using different internet services are targeted every day through different replicated websites. The phishing attacker spreads messages containing false URL links through emails, social media platforms, or messages, targeting people to steal sensitive data like credentials. Attackers generate phishing URLs that resemble those of legitimate websites to gain these confidential data. Hence, there is a need to prevent the siphoning of data through the duplication of trustworthy websites and raise public awareness of such practices. For this purpose, many machine learning and deep learning models have been employed to detect and prevent phishing attacks, but due to the ever-evolving nature of these attacks, many systems fail to provide accurate results. In this study, we propose a deep learning-based system using a 1D convolutional neural network to detect phishing URLs. The experimental work was performed using datasets from Phish-Tank, UNB, and Alexa, which successfully generated 200 thousand phishing URLs and 200 thousand legitimate URLs. The experimental results show that the proposed system achieved 99.7% accuracy, which was better than the traditional models proposed for URL-based phishing detection.

8 February 2022 in Mathematics
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Journal Article
Open access
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Iftikhar AhmadIftikhar Ahmad
Iftikhar Ahmad
EQEmad Ul Haq Qazi
Emad Ul Haq Qazi
MIMuhammad Imran
Muhammad Imran
Madini O. AlassafiMadini O. Alassafi
Madini O. Alassafi
RARayed AlGhamdi
Rayed AlGhamdi
Intrusion detection in computer networks is of great importance because of its effects on the different communication and security domains. The detection of network intrusion is a challenge. Moreover, network intrusion detection remains a challenging task as a massive amount of data is required to train the state-of-the-art machine learning models to detect network intrusion threats. Many approaches have already been proposed recently on network intrusion detection. However, they face critical challenges owing to the continuous increase in new threats that current systems do not understand. This paper compares multiple techniques to develop a network intrusion detection system. Optimum features are selected from the dataset based on the correlation between the features. Furthermore, we propose an AdaBoost-based approach for network intrusion detection based on these selected features and present its detailed functionality and performance. Unlike most previous studies, which employ the KDD99 dataset, we used a recent and comprehensive UNSW-NB 15 dataset for network anomaly detection. This dataset is a collection of network packets exchanged between hosts. It comprises 49 attributes, including nine types of threats such as DoS, Fuzzers, Exploit, Worm, shellcode, reconnaissance, generic, and analysis Backdoor. In this study, we employ SVM and MLP for comparison. Finally, we propose AdaBoost based on the decision tree classifier to classify normal activity and possible threats. We monitored the network traffic and classified it into either threats or non-threats. The experimental findings showed that our proposed method effectively detects different forms of network intrusions on computer networks and achieves an accuracy of 99.3% on the UNSW-NB15 dataset. The proposed system will be helpful in network security applications and research domains.

8 March 2023 in Mathematics
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Journal Article
Open access
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ASAsrar Ahmed Sabir
Asrar Ahmed Sabir
Iftikhar AhmadIftikhar Ahmad
Iftikhar Ahmad
Hassan AhmadHassan Ahmad
Hassan Ahmad
Muhammad Rafiq, PhDMuhammad Rafiq, PhD
Muhammad Rafiq, PhD
Muhammad Asghar KhanMuhammad Asghar Khan
Muhammad Asghar Khan
Neelum NoreenNeelum Noreen
Neelum Noreen
Artificial intelligence (AI) has provided significant help in many fields of life. This study proposed a framework that helped in understanding customers’ attitudes about the adoption of Robo-advisors. The role of the Technology Readiness Index moderated as one of the primary relationships. A total of 208 potential users of Robo-advisor services provided the data that confirmed the validity of the model. This model provided the input for structural equation modeling and analysis of the study hypotheses. The results indicated that consumers showed positive attitudes about Robo-advisor services, with the moderating effect of Technology Readiness Index dimensions, namely, contributors and inhibitors. Perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, and perceived convenience influenced consumers in developing positive attitudes about this service. Financial businesses can design better AI Robo-advisor services to fulfill the requirements of a wide range of consumers. This proposed framework contributes to the consumers’ understanding of behavioral intentions for the use of Robo-advisors in FinTech.