The upcoming fifth-generation (5G) mobile technology, which includes advanced communication features, is posing new challenges on cybersecurity defense systems. Although innovative approaches have evolved in the last few years, 5G will make existing intrusion detection and defense procedures become obsolete, in case they are not adapted accordingly. In this sense, this paper proposes a novel 5G-oriented cyberdefense architecture to identify cyberthreats in 5G mobile networks efficient and quickly enough. For this, our architecture uses deep learning techniques to analyze network traffic by extracting features from network flows. Moreover, our proposal allows adapting, automatically, the configuration of the cyberdefense architecture in order to manage traffic fluctuation, aiming both to optimize the computing resources needed in each particular moment and to fine tune the behavior and the performance of analysis and detection processes. Experiments using a well-known botnet data set depict how a neural network model reaches a sufficient classification accuracy in our anomaly detection system. Extended experiments using diverse deep learning solutions analyze and determine their suitability and performance for different network traffic loads. The experimental results show how our architecture can self-adapt the anomaly detection system based on the volume of network flows gathered from 5G subscribers' user equipments in real-time and optimizing the resource consumption.

Medical Cyber-Physical Systems (MCPS) hold the promise of reducing human errors and optimizing healthcare by delivering new ways to monitor, diagnose and treat patients through integrated clinical environments (ICE). Despite the benefits provided by MCPS, many of the ICE medical devices have not been designed to satisfy cybersecurity requirements and, consequently, are vulnerable to recent attacks. Nowadays, ransomware attacks account for 85% of all malware in healthcare, and more than 70% of attacks confirmed data disclosure. With the goal of improving this situation, the main contribution of this paper is an automatic, intelligent and real-time system to detect, classify, and mitigate ransomware in ICE. The proposed solution is fully integrated with the ICE++ architecture, our previous work, and makes use of Machine Learning (ML) techniques to detect and classify the spreading phase of ransomware attacks affecting ICE. Additionally, Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software Defined Networking (SDN)paradigms are considered to mitigate the ransomware spreading by isolating and replacing infected devices. Different experiments returned a precision/recall of 92.32%/99.97% in anomaly detection, an accuracy of 99.99% in ransomware classification, and promising detection and mitigation times. Finally, different labelled ransomware datasets in ICE have been created and made publicly available.

Industrial Control Systems (ICSs) are widely used in critical infrastructures to support the essential services of society. Therefore, their protection against terrorist activities, natural disasters, and cyber threats is critical. Diverse cyber attack detection systems have been proposed over the years, in which each proposal has applied different steps and methods. However, there is a significant gap in the literature regarding methodologies to detect cyber attacks in ICS scenarios. The lack of such methodologies prevents researchers from being able to accurately compare proposals and results. In this work, we present a Methodology for Anomaly Detection in Industrial Control Systems (MADICS) to detect cyber attacks in ICS scenarios, which is intended to provide a guideline for future works in the field. MADICS is based on a semi-supervised anomaly detection paradigm and makes use of deep learning algorithms to model ICS behaviors. It consists of five main steps, focused on pre-processing the dataset to be used with the machine learning and deep learning algorithms; performing feature filtering to remove those features that do not meet the requirements; feature extraction processes to obtain higher order features; selecting, fine-tuning, and training the most appropriate model; and validating the model performance. In order to validate MADICS, we used the popular Secure Water Treatment (SWaT) dataset, which was collected from a fully operational water treatment plant. The experiments demonstrate that, using MADICS, we can achieve a state-of-the-art precision of 0.984 (as well as a recall of 0.750 and F1-score of 0.851), which is above the average of other works, proving that the proposed methodology is suitable for use in real ICS scenarios.

Fog and mobile edge computing (MEC) will play a key role in the upcoming fifth generation (5G) mobile networks to support decentralized applications, data analytics and management into the network itself by using a highly distributed compute model. Furthermore, increasing attention is paid to providing user-centric cybersecurity solutions, which particularly require collecting, processing and analyzing significantly large amount of data traffic and huge number of network connections in 5G networks. In this regard, this paper proposes a MEC-oriented solution in 5G mobile networks to detect network anomalies in real-time and in autonomic way. Our proposal uses deep learning techniques to analyze network flows and to detect network anomalies. Moreover, it uses policies in order to provide an efficient and dynamic management system of the computing resources used in the anomaly detection process. The paper presents relevant aspects of the deployment of the proposal and experimental results to show its performance.

Continuous authentication systems for mobile devices focus on identifying users according to their behaviour patterns when they interact with mobile devices. Among the benefits provided by these systems, we highlight the enhancement of the system security, having permanently authenticated the users; and the improvement of the users’ quality of experience, minimising the use of authentication credentials. Despite the benefits of these systems, they also have open challenges such as the authentication accuracy and the adaptability to new users’ behaviours. Continuous authentication systems should manage these challenges without forgetting critical aspects of mobile devices such as battery consumption, computational limitations and response time. With the goal of improving these previous challenges, the main contribution of this paper is the design and implementation of an intelligent and adaptive continuous authentication system for mobile devices. The proposed system enables the real-time users’ authentication by considering statistical information from applications, sensors and Machine Learning techniques based on anomaly detection. Several experiments demonstrated the accuracy, adaptability, and resources consumption of our solution. Finally, its utility is validated through the design and implementation of an online bank application as proof of concept, which allows users to perform different actions according to their authentication level.

Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) arose as systems that merge computing systems with the human brain to facilitate recording, stimulation, and inhibition of neural activity. Over the years, the development of BCI technologies has shifted towards miniaturization of devices that can be seamlessly embedded into the brain and can target single neuron or small population sensing and control. We present a motivating example highlighting vulnerabilities of two promising micron-scale BCI technologies, demonstrating the lack of security and privacy principles in existing solutions. This situation opens the door to a novel family of cyberattacks, called neuronal cyberattacks, affecting neuronal signaling. This article defines the first two neural cyberattacks, Neuronal Flooding (FLO) and Neuronal Scanning (SCA), where each threat can affect the natural activity of neurons. This work implements these attacks in a neuronal simulator to determine their impact over the spontaneous neuronal behavior, defining three metrics: number of spikes, percentage of shifts, and dispersion of spikes. Several experiments demonstrate that both cyberattacks produce a reduction of spikes compared to spontaneous behavior, generating a rise in temporal shifts and a dispersion increase. Mainly, SCA presents a higher impact than FLO in the metrics focused on the number of spikes and dispersion, where FLO is slightly more damaging, considering the percentage of shifts. Nevertheless, the intrinsic behavior of each attack generates a differentiation on how they alter neuronal signaling. FLO is adequate to generate an immediate impact on the neuronal activity, whereas SCA presents higher effectiveness for damages to the neural signaling in the long-term.