Zakaria El Mrabet

Zakaria El Mrabet, Daisy Flora Selvaraj, Prakash Ranganathan

Synchrophasor technology or phasor measurement units (PMUs) are known to detect multiple type of oscillations or faults better than Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems, but the volume of Bigdata (e.g., 30-120 samples per second on a single PMU) generated by these sensors at the aggregator level (e.g., several PMUs) requires special handling. Conventional machine learning or data mining methods are not suitable to handle such larger streaming realtime data. This is primarily due to latencies associated with cloud environments (e.g., at an aggregator or PDC level), and thus necessitates the need for local computing to move the data on the edge (or locally at the PMU level) for processing. This requires faster real-time streaming algorithms to be processed at the local level (e.g., typically by a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) based controllers). This paper proposes a transfer learning-based hoeffding tree with ADWIN (THAT) method to detect anomalous synchrophasor signatures. The proposed algorithm is trained and tested with the OzaBag method. The preliminary results with transfer learning indicate that a computational time saving of 0.7ms is achieved with THAT algorithm (0.34ms) over Ozabag (1.04ms), while the accuracy of both methods in detecting fault events remains at 94% for four signatures.

Fatima Salahdine, Zakaria El Mrabet, Naima Kaabouch

Phishing attacks are one of the most common social engineering attacks targeting users emails to fraudulently steal confidential and sensitive information. They can be used as a part of more massive attacks launched to gain a foothold in corporate or government networks. Over the last decade, a number of anti-phishing techniques have been proposed to detect and mitigate these attacks. However, they are still inefficient and inaccurate. Thus, there is a great need for efficient and accurate detection techniques to cope with these attacks. In this paper, we proposed a phishing attack detection technique based on machine learning. We collected and analyzed more than 4000 phishing emails targeting the email service of the University of North Dakota. We modeled these attacks by selecting 10 relevant features and building a large dataset. This dataset was used to train, validate, and test the machine learning algorithms. For performance evaluation, four metrics have been used, namely probability of detection, probability of miss-detection, probability of false alarm, and accuracy. The experimental results show that better detection can be achieved using an artificial neural network.

Zakaria El Mrabet, Youness Arjoune, Hassan El Ghazi et al.

Cognitive radio technology addresses the problem of spectrum scarcity by allowing secondary users to use the vacant spectrum bands without causing interference to the primary users. However, several attacks could disturb the normal functioning of the cognitive radio network. Primary user emulation attacks are one of the most severe attacks in which a malicious user emulates the primary user signal characteristics to either prevent other legitimate secondary users from accessing the idle channels or causing harmful interference to the primary users. There are several proposed approaches to detect the primary user emulation attackers. However, most of these techniques assume that the primary user location is fixed, which does not make them valid when the primary user is mobile. In this paper, we propose a new approach based on the Kalman filter framework for detecting the primary user emulation attacks with a non-stationary primary user. Several experiments have been conducted and the advantages of the proposed approach are demonstrated through the simulation results.

Zakaria El Mrabet, Hamid El Ghazi, Tayeb Sadiki et al.

Cloud computing is a new model of computing which provides scalability, flexibility and on-demand service. Virtualization is one of the main components of the cloud, but unfortunately, this technology suffers from many security vulnerabilities. The main purpose of this paper is to present a new secure architecture of Virtual Network machines in order to increase security among virtual machines in a virtualized environment (Xen as a case study). First, we expose the different network modes based on Xen Hypervisor, and then we analyze vulnerabilities and security issues within this kind of environment. Finally, we present in details new secure architecture and demonstrate how it can face the main security network attacks.

Zakaria El Mrabet, Hassan El Ghazi, Naima Kaabouch et al.

Smart grid uses the power of information technology to intelligently deliver energy to customers by using a two-way communication, and wisely meet the environmental requirements by facilitating the integration of green technologies. Although smart grid addresses several problems of the traditional grid, it faces a number of security challenges. Because communication has been incorporated into the electrical power with its inherent weaknesses, it has exposed the system to numerous risks. Several research papers have discussed these problems. However, most of them classified attacks based on confidentiality, integrity, and availability, and they excluded attacks which compromise other security criteria such as accountability. In addition, the existed security countermeasures focus on countering some specific attacks or protecting some specific components, but there is no global approach which combines these solutions to secure the entire system. The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive overview of the relevant published works. First, we review the security requirements. Then, we investigate in depth a number of important cyber-attacks in smart grid to diagnose the potential vulnerabilities along with their impact. In addition, we proposed a cyber security strategy as a solution to address breaches, counter attacks, and deploy appropriate countermeasures. Finally, we provide some future research directions.