The ISC International Journal of Information Security

Abstract The Internet of Things (IoT) offers transformative potential across sectors like energy, defense, and healthcare, but its limited resources make it vulnerable to cyberattacks, necessitating robust security measures such as intrusion detection systems (IDS) to safeguard its infrastructure. This article presents a study that helps intrusion detection systems identify malicious and legitimate communications. To help the system make the best decisions possible, the subcategory of the attacked traffic is also classified. We trained the suggested models to be capable of binary and multi-class classification, targeting common attacks like denial of service (DoS), distributed denial of service (DDoS), reconnaissance, and information theft directed at IoT devices. Our methodology makes use of recently published IoT datasets, such as BoTIoT, ToNIoT, WUSTL-IIOT-20212021, and CiCIoT. To assess and contrast the performance of the proposed models on these datasets, we first applied stratified undersampling to convert the original imbalanced datasets into balanced subsets, which were then used for training and evaluation. Among the models evaluated, biLSTM achieved the highest accuracy of 99.66% and MCC of 0.99759 on the WUSTL-IIoT-2021 dataset. On the BoTIoT dataset, CNN with Dual Focal Loss reached 97.76% accuracy and 0.95536 MCC. For ToNIoT, LSTM achieved 97.01% accuracy with an MCC of 0.93643, while on the CiCIoT dataset, biLSTM obtained 96.23% accuracy and 0.96347 MCC. The results show that biLSTM and LSTM models give higher performance than FNN and CNN models in terms of precision, recall, F1 score, and MCC across all datasets, demonstrating improved performance for temporal IoT intrusion detection tasks.

Abstract Online social media is integral to human life, facilitating messaging, information sharing, and confidential communication while preserving privacy. Platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook exemplify this phenomenon. However, users face challenges due to network anomalies, often stemming from malicious activities such as identity theft for financial gain or harm. This paper proposes a novel method using user similarity measures and the Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) algorithm to identify anomalies (fake nodes) in user accounts in a large-scale social network while handling imbalanced data issues. Despite the problem's complexity, the method achieves an AUC rate of 80\% in classifying and detecting fake accounts. Notably, the study builds on previous research, highlighting advancements and insights into the evolving landscape of anomaly detection in online social networks. The findings of this study contribute to ongoing advancements in fake account detection, offering a hopeful solution for securing online spaces against fraudulent activities and anomaly detection in social networks.

Abstract Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks threaten server and network availability with minimal resources. These attacks mimic legitimate traffic, evading Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) and Intrusion Prevention Systems(IPS). The primary challenge in countering DDoS attacks is achieving early detection as close to their origin. In addition, the persistence of malicious traffic hidden within legitimate traffic remains a common challenge for various mitigation techniques. This paper introduces a modular approach for identifying and mitigating DDoS attacks in both online and offline settings, using deep learning and rule-based techniques. We train the IDS with VGG16, GoogLeNet, Support Vector Machines (SVM), and Random Forest (RF) and evaluate them using the CICDDoS2019 dataset. Our experiments show a detection accuracy of 99.87% offline and 99.67% online. Our methodology outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in offline detection, particularly with VGG16 and GoogLeNet. In our online setup, the mitigation module successfully addresses all attacks detected by our anti-DDoS solution.

Abstract Industrial control systems are widely used in industrial sectors and critical infrastructures to monitor and control industrial processes. Recently, the security of industrial control systems has attracted a lot of attention, because these systems are now increasingly interacting with the Internet. Classic systems are suffering from many security problems and with the expansion
of Internet connectivity, they are now exposed to new types of threats and cyber-attacks. Addressing this, intrusion detection technology is one of the most important security solutions that is used in industrial control systems to identify
potential attacks and malicious activities. In this paper, we propose Stacked Autoencoder-Deep Neural Network (SAE-DNN), as a semi-supervised Intrusion Detection System (IDS) with appropriate performance and applicability on a wide range of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs). The proposed approach comprises a stacked autoencoder, a deep learning-based feature extractor, helping us with a low dimension and low noise representation of data. In addition, our system includes a deep neural network (DNN)-based classifier, which is used to detect anomalies with a high detection rate and low false positive rate in a real-time process. The SAE-DNN’s performance is evaluated on the WADI dataset, which is a real testbed for a water distribution system. The results indicate the superior performance of our approach over existing supervised and unsupervised methods while using a few percentages of labeled data.

Abstract Side-channel Analysis (SCA) attacks are effective methods for extracting encryption keys, and with deep learning (DL) techniques, much stronger attacks have been carried out on victim devices. However, carrying out this kind of attack is much more challenging in cross-device attacks when the profiling device and target device are similar but not the same, which can cause the attack to fail. We also reached this conclusion when using only DL-SCA attack on our cross-devise (Atmega microcontroller devices). Due to different processes that lead to significant device-to-device variations, the accuracy of the attack was, on average, only 23%. In this paper, we proposed a method for a real attack on cross-devices using pre-processing methods based on a combination of DL-based Autoencoder and Gaussian low-pass filter (GLPF). According to our analysis results, the accuracy of the attack using only deep learning-based Autoencoder increased to 70% on average, and it improved up to 82% by adding the GLPF technique. The results also showed that combining DL-based autoencoder and GLPF can lead to a successful attack with a maximum of 300 power traces from the victim device.

Abstract Today, with the advancement of science and technology, the use of smartphones has become very common, and the Android operating system has been able to gain lots of popularity in the meantime. However, these devices face many
security challenges, including malware. Malware may cause many problems in both the security and privacy of users. So far, the state-of-the-art method in malware detection is based on deep learning, however, this approach requires a lot of computing resources and leads to high battery usage, which is unacceptable in smartphone devices. This paper proposes the knowledge distillation approach for lightening android malware detection. To this end, first, a heavy model is taught and then with the knowledge distillation approach, its knowledge is transferred to a light model called student. To simplify the learning process, soft labels are used here. The resulting model, although slightly less accurate in identification, has a much smaller size than the heavier model. Moreover, ensemble learning was proposed to recover the dropped accuracy. We have tested the proposed approach on CISC datasets including dynamic and static features, and the results show that the proposed method is not only able to lighten the model up to 99%, but also maintain the accuracy of the lightened model to the extent of the heavy model.

Abstract Date fruits are considered essential food and the most important agricultural crop in Saudi Arabia. Where Saudi Arabia produces many of the types of dates per year. Collecting large data for date fruits is a difficult task and consumed
time, besides some of the date types are seasonal. Wherein convolutional neural networks (CNN) model needs large datasets to achieve high classification accuracy and avoid the overfitting problem. In this paper, an augmented date fruits dataset was developed using deep convolutional generative adversarial networks techniques (DCGAN). The dataset contains 600 images for three varieties of dates (Sukkari, Suggai and Ajwa). The performance of DCGAN was evaluated using Keras and MobileNet models. An extensive simulation shows the classify using DCGAN with the MobileNet model achieved 88% of accuracy. Whilst 44% for the Keras. Besides, MobileNet achieved better classification in the original dataset.

Abstract With present-day technological advancements, the number of devices connected to the Internet has increased dramatically. Cybersecurity attacks are increasingly becoming a threat to individuals and organizations. Contemporary security frameworks incorporate Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS). These systems are an essential component for ensuring the security of computer networks against attacks. In this paper, two deep learning architectures are proposed for both binary and multi-class classification of network attacks. The models, CNN-IDS and LSTM-IDS, are based on Convolutional Neural Network and Long Short Term Memory architectures, respectively. The models are evaluated using the well-known NSL-KDD dataset. The performance is measured in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, and F-measure. Experimental results show that the models achieve good performance in terms of accuracy and recall. Network intrusion detection systems are an integral part of contemporary networks. They provide administrators with an early warning for known and unknown attacks. In this paper, two deep learning architectures to aid administrators in detecting network attacks are outlined