Francesco Mercaldo

Dr. Francesco Mercaldo

Department of Medicine and Health Sciences “Vincenzo Tiberio”, University of Molise, 86100 Campobasso, Italy
orcid

Research Focus & Metrics

Academic Career Length

14Years (2013-Present)

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

Representative Publications

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30 April 2023
Verified
Conference Paper
Open access
HZHaozhen Zhang
Haozhen Zhang
LYLe Yu
Le Yu
XXXi Xiao
Xi Xiao
QLQing Li
Qing Li
Francesco MercaldoFrancesco Mercaldo
Francesco Mercaldo
QLQixu Liu
Qixu Liu
Encrypted traffic classification is receiving widespread attention from researchers and industrial companies. However, the existing methods only extract flow-level features, failing to handle short flows because of unreliable statistical properties, or treat the header and payload equally, failing to mine the potential correlation between bytes. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a byte-level traffic graph construction approach based on point-wise mutual information (PMI), and a model named Temporal Fusion Encoder using Graph Neural Networks (TFE-GNN) for feature extraction. In particular, we design a dual embedding layer, a GNN-based traffic graph encoder as well as a cross-gated feature fusion mechanism, which can first embed the header and payload bytes separately and then fuses them together to obtain a stronger feature representation. The experimental results on two real datasets demonstrate that TFE-GNN outperforms multiple state-of-the-art methods in fine-grained encrypted traffic classification tasks.

1 June 2021 in Computers & Security
Verified
Journal Article
Closed access
GIGiacomo Iadarola
Giacomo Iadarola
FMFabio Martinelli
Fabio Martinelli
Francesco MercaldoFrancesco Mercaldo
Francesco Mercaldo
ASAntonella Santone
Antonella Santone

1 March 2020 in Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine
Verified
Journal Article
Closed access
LBLuca Brunese
Luca Brunese
Francesco MercaldoFrancesco Mercaldo
Francesco Mercaldo
ARAlfonso Reginelli
Alfonso Reginelli
ASAntonella Santone
Antonella Santone

13 January 2020 in Journal of Computer Virology and Hacking Techniques
Verified
Journal Article
Closed access
PDF file
Francesco MercaldoFrancesco Mercaldo
Francesco Mercaldo
ASAntonella Santone
Antonella Santone

26 August 2022 in IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging
Verified
Journal Article
Closed access
Pan HuangPan Huang
Pan Huang
PHPeng He
Peng He
TSTian Sunkun
Tian Sunkun
MMMingrui Ma
Mingrui Ma
PFPeng Feng
Peng Feng
Jing QinJing Qin
Jing Qin
The tumor grading of laryngeal cancer pathological images needs to be accurate and interpretable. The deep learning model based on the attention mechanism-integrated convolution (AMC) block has good inductive bias capability but poor interpretability, whereas the deep learning model based on the vision transformer (ViT) block has good interpretability but weak inductive bias ability. Therefore, we propose an end-to-end ViT-AMC network (ViT-AMCNet) with adaptive model fusion and multiobjective optimization that integrates and fuses the ViT and AMC blocks. However, existing model fusion methods often have negative fusion: 1). There is no guarantee that the ViT and AMC blocks will simultaneously have good feature representation capability. 2). The difference in feature representations learning between the ViT and AMC blocks is not obvious, so there is much redundant information in the two feature representations. Accordingly, we first prove the feasibility of fusing the ViT and AMC blocks based on Hoeffding’s inequality. Then, we propose a multiobjective optimization method to solve the problem that ViT and AMC blocks cannot simultaneously have good feature representation. Finally, an adaptive model fusion method integrating the metrics block and the fusion block is proposed to increase the differences between feature representations and improve the deredundancy capability. Our methods improve the fusion ability of ViT-AMCNet, and experimental results demonstrate that ViT-AMCNet significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Importantly, the visualized interpretive maps are closer to the region of interest of concern by pathologists, and the generalization ability is also excellent. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Baron-Huang/ViT-AMCNet.

15 January 2021 in IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems
Verified
Journal Article
Closed access
Flora AmatoFlora Amato
Flora Amato
LCLuigi Coppolino
Luigi Coppolino
Francesco MercaldoFrancesco Mercaldo
Francesco Mercaldo
FMFrancesco Moscato
Francesco Moscato
Roberto NardoneRoberto Nardone
Roberto Nardone
ASAntonella Santone
Antonella Santone
Modern cars include a huge number of sensors and actuators, which continuously exchange data and control commands. The most used protocol for communication of different components in automotive system is the Controller Area Network (CAN). According to CAN, components communicate by broadcasting messages on a bus. In addition, the standard definition of the protocol does not provide information for authentication, so exposing it to attacks. This paper proposes a method based on deep learning aiming at discovering attacks towards the CAN-bus. In particular, Neural Networks and MultiLayer Perceptrons are the class of networks employed in our approach. We also validate our approach by analysing a real-world dataset with the injection of messages from different types of attacks: denial of service, fuzzy pattern attacks, and attacks against specific components. The obtained results are encouraging and demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach.