Yang Xin

Yang Xin


Research Focus & Metrics

Academic Career Length

20Years (2007-Present)

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

Representative Publications

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2 March 2020 in Applied Sciences
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
PDF file
XLXin Li
Xin Li
LWLu Wang
Lu Wang
YXYang Xin
Yang Xin
YYYixian Yang
Yixian Yang
YCYuling Chen
Yuling Chen
Vulnerability is one of the root causes of network intrusion. An effective way to mitigate security threats is to discover and patch vulnerabilities before an attack. Traditional vulnerability detection methods rely on manual participation and incur a high false positive rate. The intelligent vulnerability detection methods suffer from the problems of long-term dependence, out of vocabulary, coarse detection granularity and lack of vulnerable samples. This paper proposes an automated and intelligent vulnerability detection method in source code based on the minimum intermediate representation learning. First, the sample in the form of source code is transformed into a minimum intermediate representation to exclude the irrelevant items and reduce the length of the dependency. Next, the intermediate representation is transformed into a real value vector through pre-training on an extended corpus, and the structure and semantic information are retained. Then, the vector is fed to three concatenated convolutional neural networks to obtain high-level features of vulnerability. Last, a classifier is trained using the learned features. To validate this vulnerability detection method, an experiment was performed. The empirical results confirmed that compared with the traditional methods and the state-of-the-art intelligent methods, our method has a better performance with fine granularity.

31 January 2020 in Applied Sciences
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
PDF file
CZChensu Zhao
Chensu Zhao
YXYang Xin
Yang Xin
XLxuefeng Li
xuefeng Li
YYYixian Yang
Yixian Yang
YCYuling Chen
Yuling Chen
The popularity of social networks provides people with many conveniences, but their rapid growth has also attracted many attackers. In recent years, the malicious behavior of social network spammers has seriously threatened the information security of ordinary users. To reduce this threat, many researchers have mined the behavior characteristics of spammers and have obtained good results by applying machine learning algorithms to identify spammers in social networks. However, most of these studies overlook class imbalance situations that exist in real world data. In this paper, we propose a heterogeneous stacking-based ensemble learning framework to ameliorate the impact of class imbalance on spam detection in social networks. The proposed framework consists of two main components, a base module and a combining module. In the base module, we adopt six different base classifiers and utilize this classifier diversity to construct new ensemble input members. In the combination module, we introduce cost sensitive learning into deep neural network training. By setting different costs for misclassification and dynamically adjusting the weights of the prediction results of the base classifiers, we can integrate the input members and aggregate the classification results. The experimental results show that our framework effectively improves the spam detection rate on imbalanced datasets.

13 June 2023 in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Verified
Journal Article
Closed access
CZChunyong Zhang
Chunyong Zhang
BLBin Liu
Bin Liu
YXYang Xin
Yang Xin
LYLiangwei Yao
Liangwei Yao
Code vulnerability detection is critical for software security prevention. Vulnerability annotation in large-scale software code is quite tedious and challenging, which requires domain experts to spend a lot of time annotating. This work offers CPVD, a cross-domain vulnerability detection approach based on the challenge of ”learning to predict the vulnerability labels of another item quickly using one item with rich vulnerability labels.” CPVD uses the code property graph to represent the code and uses the Graph Attention Network and Convolution Pooling Network to extract the graph feature vector. It reduces the distribution between the source domain and target domain data in the Domain Adaptation Representation Learning stage for cross-domain vulnerability detection. In this paper, we test each other on different real-world project codes. Compared with methods without domain adaptation and domain adaptation methods based on natural language processing, CPVD is more general and performs better in cross-domain vulnerability detection tasks. Specifically, for the four datasets of chr_deb, qemu, libav, and sard, they achieved the best results of 70.2%, 81.1%, 59.7%, and 78.1% respectively on the F1-Score, and 88.4%,86.3%, 85.2%, and 88.6% on the AUC.

1 September 2018 in Applied Sciences
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
PDF file
FZFei Zhao
Fei Zhao
JZJiyong Zhao
Jiyong Zhao
XNXinXin Niu
XinXin Niu
SLShoushan Luo
Shoushan Luo
YXYang Xin
Yang Xin
For a large number of network attacks, feature selection is used to improve intrusion detection efficiency. A new mutual information algorithm of the redundant penalty between features (RPFMI) algorithm with the ability to select optimal features is proposed in this paper. Three factors are considered in this new algorithm: the redundancy between features, the impact between selected features and classes and the relationship between candidate features and classes. An experiment is conducted using the proposed algorithm for intrusion detection on the KDD Cup 99 intrusion dataset and the Kyoto 2006+ dataset. Compared with other algorithms, the proposed algorithm has a much higher accuracy rate (i.e., 99.772%) on the DOS data and can achieve better performance on remote-to-login (R2L) data and user-to-root (U2R) data. For the Kyoto 2006+ dataset, the proposed algorithm possesses the highest accuracy rate (i.e., 97.749%) among the other algorithms. The experiment results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is a highly effective feature selection method in the intrusion detection.

2 April 2021 in Applied Sciences
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
PDF file
XLXin Li
Xin Li
LWLu Wang
Lu Wang
YXYang Xin
Yang Xin
YYYixian Yang
Yixian Yang
QTQifeng Tang
Qifeng Tang
YCYuling Chen
Yuling Chen
Vulnerabilities threaten the security of information systems. It is crucial to detect and patch vulnerabilities before attacks happen. However, existing vulnerability detection methods suffer from long-term dependency, out of vocabulary, bias towards global features or local features, and coarse detection granularity. This paper proposes an automatic vulnerability detection framework in source code based on a hybrid neural network. First, the inputs are transformed into an intermediate representation with explicit structure information using lower level virtual machine intermediate representation (LLVM IR) and backward program slicing. After the transformation, the size of samples and the size of vocabulary are significantly reduced. A hybrid neural network model is then applied to extract high-level features of vulnerability, which learns features both from convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and recurrent neural networks (RNNs). The former is applied to learn local vulnerability features, such as buffer size. Furthermore, the latter is utilized to learn global features, such as data dependency. The extracted features are made up of concatenated outputs of CNN and RNN. Experiments are performed to validate our vulnerability detection method. The results show that our proposed method achieves excellent results with F1-scores of 98.6% and accuracy of 99.0% on the SARD dataset. It outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

18 November 2020 in Applied Sciences
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
PDF file
CZChensu Zhao
Chensu Zhao
YXYang Xin
Yang Xin
XLxuefeng Li
xuefeng Li
ZHZhu Hongliang
Zhu Hongliang
YYYixian Yang
Yixian Yang
YCYuling Chen
Yuling Chen
With the rapid development of social networks, spam bots and other anomaly accounts’ malicious behavior has become a critical information security problem threatening the social network platform. In order to reduce this threat, the existing research mainly uses feature-based detection or propagation-based detection, and it applies machine learning or graph mining algorithms to identify anomaly accounts in social networks. However, with the development of technology, spam bots are becoming more advanced, and identifying bots is still an open challenge. This paper proposes a new semi-supervised graph embedding model based on a graph attention network for spam bot detection in social networks. This approach constructs a detection model by aggregating features and neighbor relationships, and learns a complex method to integrate the different neighborhood relationships between nodes to operate the directed social graph. The new model can identify spam bots by capturing user features and two different relationships among users in social networks. We compare our method with other methods on real-world social network datasets, and the experimental results show that our proposed model achieves a significant and consistent improvement.