Reshmi Mitra

Praneet Singh, Jishnu Jaykumar, Akhil Pankaj et al.

Edge nodes are crucial for detection against multitudes of cyber attacks on Internet-of-Things endpoints and is set to become part of a multi-billion industry. The resource constraints in this novel network infrastructure tier constricts the deployment of existing Network Intrusion Detection System with Deep Learning models (DLM). We address this issue by developing a novel light, fast and accurate 'Edge-Detect' model, which detects Distributed Denial of Service attack on edge nodes using DLM techniques. Our model can work within resource restrictions i.e. low power, memory and processing capabilities, to produce accurate results at a meaningful pace. It is built by creating layers of Long Short-Term Memory or Gated Recurrent Unit based cells, which are known for their excellent representation of sequential data. We designed a practical data science pipeline with Recurring Neural Network to learn from the network packet behavior in order to identify whether it is normal or attack-oriented. The model evaluation is from deployment on actual edge node represented by Raspberry Pi using current cybersecurity dataset (UNSW2015). Our results demonstrate that in comparison to conventional DLM techniques, our model maintains a high testing accuracy of 99% even with lower resource utilization in terms of cpu and memory. In addition, it is nearly 3 times smaller in size than the state-of-art model and yet requires a much lower testing time.

K Naveen Kumar, C Vishnu, Reshmi Mitra et al.

Despite the high quality performance of the deep neural network in real-world applications, they are susceptible to minor perturbations of adversarial attacks. This is mostly undetectable to human vision. The impact of such attacks has become extremely detrimental in autonomous vehicles with real-time "safety" concerns. The black-box adversarial attacks cause drastic misclassification in critical scene elements such as road signs and traffic lights leading the autonomous vehicle to crash into other vehicles or pedestrians. In this paper, we propose a novel query-based attack method called Modified Simple black-box attack (M-SimBA) to overcome the use of a white-box source in transfer based attack method. Also, the issue of late convergence in a Simple black-box attack (SimBA) is addressed by minimizing the loss of the most confused class which is the incorrect class predicted by the model with the highest probability, instead of trying to maximize the loss of the correct class. We evaluate the performance of the proposed approach to the German Traffic Sign Recognition Benchmark (GTSRB) dataset. We show that the proposed model outperforms the existing models like Transfer-based projected gradient descent (T-PGD), SimBA in terms of convergence time, flattening the distribution of confused class probability, and producing adversarial samples with least confidence on the true class.

Samaikya Valluripally, Aniket Gulhane, Reshmi Mitra et al.

Social Virtual Reality Learning Environment (VRLE) is a novel edge computing platform for collaboration amongst distributed users. Given that VRLEs are used for critical applications (e.g., special education, public safety training), it is important to ensure security and privacy issues. In this paper, we present a novel framework to obtain quantitative assessments of threats and vulnerabilities for VRLEs. Based on the use cases from an actual social VRLE viz., vSocial, we first model the security and privacy using the attack trees. Subsequently, these attack trees are converted into stochastic timed automata representations that allow for rigorous statistical model checking. Such an analysis helps us adopt pertinent design principles such as hardening, diversity and principle of least privilege to enhance the resilience of social VRLEs. Through experiments in a vSocial case study, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our attack tree modeling with a reduction of 26% in probability of loss of integrity (security) and 80% in privacy leakage (privacy) in before and after scenarios pertaining to the adoption of the design principles.

Aniket Gulhane, Akhil Vyas, Reshmi Mitra et al.

Social Virtual Reality based Learning Environments (VRLEs) such as vSocial render instructional content in a three-dimensional immersive computer experience for training youth with learning impediments. There are limited prior works that explored attack vulnerability in VR technology, and hence there is a need for systematic frameworks to quantify risks corresponding to security, privacy, and safety (SPS) threats. The SPS threats can adversely impact the educational user experience and hinder delivery of VRLE content. In this paper, we propose a novel risk assessment framework that utilizes attack trees to calculate a risk score for varied VRLE threats with rate and duration of threats as inputs. We compare the impact of a well-constructed attack tree with an adhoc attack tree to study the trade-offs between overheads in managing attack trees, and the cost of risk mitigation when vulnerabilities are identified. We use a vSocial VRLE testbed in a case study to showcase the effectiveness of our framework and demonstrate how a suitable attack tree formalism can result in a more safer, privacy-preserving and secure VRLE system.