Qasem Abu Al-Haija

Prof. Dr. Qasem Abu Al-Haija

Cybersecurity, JORDAN UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY, Irbid, Jordan
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Research Focus & Metrics

Academic Career Length

16Years (2011-Present)

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

Representative Publications

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16 May 2022 in Applied Sciences
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Journal Article
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KAKhalid Albulayhi
Khalid Albulayhi
Qasem Abu Al-HaijaQasem Abu Al-Haija
Qasem Abu Al-Haija
SASuliman A. Alsuhibany
Suliman A. Alsuhibany
Ananth JillepalliAnanth Jillepalli
Ananth Jillepalli
MAMohammad Ashrafuzzaman
Mohammad Ashrafuzzaman
Frederick T. SheldonFrederick T. Sheldon
Frederick T. Sheldon
The Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem has experienced significant growth in data traffic and consequently high dimensionality. Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) are essential self-protective tools against various cyber-attacks. However, IoT IDS systems face significant challenges due to functional and physical diversity. These IoT characteristics make exploiting all features and attributes for IDS self-protection difficult and unrealistic. This paper proposes and implements a novel feature selection and extraction approach (i.e., our method) for anomaly-based IDS. The approach begins with using two entropy-based approaches (i.e., information gain (IG) and gain ratio (GR)) to select and extract relevant features in various ratios. Then, mathematical set theory (union and intersection) is used to extract the best features. The model framework is trained and tested on the IoT intrusion dataset 2020 (IoTID20) and NSL-KDD dataset using four machine learning algorithms: Bagging, Multilayer Perception, J48, and IBk. Our approach has resulted in 11 and 28 relevant features (out of 86) using the intersection and union, respectively, on IoTID20 and resulted 15 and 25 relevant features (out of 41) using the intersection and union, respectively, on NSL-KDD. We have further compared our approach with other state-of-the-art studies. The comparison reveals that our model is superior and competent, scoring a very high 99.98% classification accuracy.

15 December 2020 in Electronics
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Journal Article
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Qasem Abu Al-HaijaQasem Abu Al-Haija
Qasem Abu Al-Haija
SZSaleh Zein-Sabatto
Saleh Zein-Sabatto
With the rapid expansion of intelligent resource-constrained devices and high-speed communication technologies, the Internet of Things (IoT) has earned wide recognition as the primary standard for low-power lossy networks (LLNs). Nevertheless, IoT infrastructures are vulnerable to cyber-attacks due to the constraints in computation, storage, and communication capacity of the endpoint devices. From one side, the majority of newly developed cyber-attacks are formed by slightly mutating formerly established cyber-attacks to produce a new attack that tends to be treated as normal traffic through the IoT network. From the other side, the influence of coupling the deep learning techniques with the cybersecurity field has become a recent inclination of many security applications due to their impressive performance. In this paper, we provide the comprehensive development of a new intelligent and autonomous deep-learning-based detection and classification system for cyber-attacks in IoT communication networks that leverage the power of convolutional neural networks, abbreviated as IoT-IDCS-CNN (IoT based Intrusion Detection and Classification System using Convolutional Neural Network). The proposed IoT-IDCS-CNN makes use of high-performance computing that employs the robust Compute Unified Device Architectures (CUDA) based Nvidia GPUs (Graphical Processing Units) and parallel processing that employs high-speed I9-core-based Intel CPUs. In particular, the proposed system is composed of three subsystems: a feature engineering subsystem, a feature learning subsystem, and a traffic classification subsystem. All subsystems were developed, verified, integrated, and validated in this research. To evaluate the developed system, we employed the Network Security Laboratory-Knowledge Discovery Databases (NSL-KDD) dataset, which includes all the key attacks in IoT computing. The simulation results demonstrated a greater than 99.3% and 98.2% cyber-attack classification accuracy for the binary-class classifier (normal vs. anomaly) and the multiclass classifier (five categories), respectively. The proposed system was validated using a K-fold cross-validation method and was evaluated using the confusion matrix parameters (i.e., true negative (TN), true positive (TP), false negative (FN), false positive (FP)), along with other classification performance metrics, including precision, recall, F1-score, and false alarm rate. The test and evaluation results of the IoT-IDCS-CNN system outperformed many recent machine-learning-based IDCS systems in the same area of study.

1 September 2020
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Conference Paper
Closed access
Qasem Abu Al-HaijaQasem Abu Al-Haija
Qasem Abu Al-Haija
AAAdeola Adebanjo
Adeola Adebanjo
Breast cancer disease is the second most common world cause of cancer death in women. However, the early diagnostics and detection can provide a significant chance for correct treatment and survival. In this work, we propose an accurate and inclusive computational breast cancer diagnosis framework using ResNet-50 convolutional neural network to classify histopathological microscopy images. The proposed model employs transfer learning technique of the powerful ResNet-50 CNN pretrained on ImageNet to train and classify BreakHis dataset into benign or malignant. The simulation results showed that our proposed model achieves exceptional classification accuracy of 99% outperforming other compared models trained on the same dataset.

21 February 2022 in Neural Computing and Applications
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Journal Article
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Qasem Abu Al-HaijaQasem Abu Al-Haija
Qasem Abu Al-Haija
ABAhmad Al Badawi
Ahmad Al Badawi

Verified
Journal Article
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Qasem Abu Al-HaijaQasem Abu Al-Haija
Qasem Abu Al-Haija
MDMuawya Naser Al Dalaien
Muawya Naser Al Dalaien
Due to the prompt expansion and development of intelligent systems and autonomous, energy-aware sensing devices, the Internet of Things (IoT) has remarkably grown and obstructed nearly all applications in our daily life. However, constraints in computation, storage, and communication capabilities of IoT devices has led to an increase in IoT-based botnet attacks. To mitigate this threat, there is a need for a lightweight and anomaly-based detection system that can build profiles for normal and malicious activities over IoT networks. In this paper, we propose an ensemble learning model for botnet attack detection in IoT networks called ELBA-IoT that profiles behavior features of IoT networks and uses ensemble learning to identify anomalous network traffic from compromised IoT devices. In addition, our IoT-based botnet detection approach characterizes the evaluation of three different machine learning techniques that belong to decision tree techniques (AdaBoosted, RUSBoosted, and bagged). To evaluate ELBA-IoT, we used the N-BaIoT-2021 dataset, which comprises records of both normal IoT network traffic and botnet attack traffic of infected IoT devices. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed ELBA-IoT can detect the botnet attacks launched from the compromised IoT devices with high detection accuracy (99.6%) and low inference overhead (40 µ-seconds). We also contrast ELBA-IoT results with other state-of-the-art results and demonstrate that ELBA-IoT is superior.

12 February 2022 in Electronics
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Journal Article
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Qasem Abu Al-HaijaQasem Abu Al-Haija
Qasem Abu Al-Haija
Moez KrichenMoez Krichen
Moez Krichen
WEWejdan Abu Elhaija
Wejdan Abu Elhaija
The massive modern technical revolution in electronics, cognitive computing, and sensing has provided critical infrastructure for the development of today’s Internet of Things (IoT) for a wide range of applications. However, because endpoint devices’ computing, storage, and communication capabilities are limited, IoT infrastructures are exposed to a wide range of cyber-attacks. As such, Darknet or blackholes (sinkholes) attacks are significant, and recent attack vectors that are launched against several IoT communication services. Since Darknet address space evolved as a reserved internet address space that is not contemplated to be used by legitimate hosts globally, any communication traffic is speculated to be unsolicited and distinctively deemed a probe, backscatter, or misconfiguration. Thus, in this paper, we develop, investigate, and evaluate the performance of machine-learning-based Darknet traffic detection systems (DTDS) in IoT networks. Mainly, we make use of six supervised machine-learning techniques, including bagging decision tree ensembles (BAG-DT), AdaBoost decision tree ensembles (ADA-DT), RUSBoosted decision tree ensembles (RUS-DT), optimizable decision tree (O-DT), optimizable k-nearest neighbor (O-KNN), and optimizable discriminant (O-DSC). We evaluate the implemented DTDS models on a recent and comprehensive dataset, known as the CIC-Darknet-2020 dataset, composed of contemporary actual IoT communication traffic involving four different classes that combine VPN and Tor traffic in a single dataset covering a wide range of captured cyber-attacks and hidden services provided by the Darknet. Our empirical performance analysis demonstrates that bagging ensemble techniques (BAG-DT) offer better accuracy and lower error rates than other implemented supervised learning techniques, scoring a 99.50% of classification accuracy with a low inferencing overhead of 9.09 µ second. Finally, we also contrast our BAG-DT-DTDS with other existing DTDS models and demonstrate that our best results are improved by (1.9~27%) over the former state-of-the-art models.