Upasana Sarmah

Parthajit Borah, Upasana Sarmah, D. K. Bhattacharyya et al.

Malware and malware-based attacks are becoming more prevalent and complex. Attackers regularly come up with new techniques that have the ability to evade conventional and signature-based malware defense. In order to address such threats, there is an increasing demand for advanced and better defense solutions. Machine learning-based techniques are efficiently capable of defending against malware and malware-based attacks. Nevertheless, creating and efficiently testing such techniques demand high-quality datasets having samples of various malware families as well as goodware. The lack of such datasets continues to be a major bottleneck in malware research. In this paper, we introduce TUANDROMD-X, a multiclass malware dataset with visual and entropy-based features of each sample, distinctly identifying malware from goodware. The dataset is created based on static analysis, lowering the overhead that comes with high feature engineering and dynamic analysis. As a result, TUANDROMD-X facilitates researchers and cyber-security experts to design faster and better malware detection systems.

Upasana Sarmah, Parthajit Borah, D. K. Bhattacharyya

Applications over the Web primarily rely on the HTTP protocol to transmit web pages to and from systems. There are a variety of application layer protocols, but among all, HTTP is the most targeted because of its versatility and ease of integration with online services. The attackers leverage the fact that by default no detection system blocks any HTTP traffic. Thus, by exploiting such characteristics of the protocol, attacks are launched against web applications. HTTP flooding attacks are one such attack in the application layer of the OSI model. In this paper, a method for the detection of such an attack is proposed. The heart of the detection method is an incremental feature subset selection method based on mutual information and correlation. INFS-MICC helps in identifying a subset of highly relevant and independent feature subset so as to detect HTTP Flooding attacks with best possible classification performance in near-real time.