Tahmid Rahman Laskar

Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar, Jimmy Huang, Vladan Smetana et al.

Industrial Information Technology (IT) infrastructures are often vulnerable to cyberattacks. To ensure security to the computer systems in an industrial environment, it is required to build effective intrusion detection systems to monitor the cyber-physical systems (e.g., computer networks) in the industry for malicious activities. This paper aims to build such intrusion detection systems to protect the computer networks from cyberattacks. More specifically, we propose a novel unsupervised machine learning approach that combines the K-Means algorithm with the Isolation Forest for anomaly detection in industrial big data scenarios. Since our objective is to build the intrusion detection system for the big data scenario in the industrial domain, we utilize the Apache Spark framework to implement our proposed model which was trained in large network traffic data (about 123 million instances of network traffic) stored in Elasticsearch. Moreover, we evaluate our proposed model on the live streaming data and find that our proposed system can be used for real-time anomaly detection in the industrial setup. In addition, we address different challenges that we face while training our model on large datasets and explicitly describe how these issues were resolved. Based on our empirical evaluation in different use-cases for anomaly detection in real-world network traffic data, we observe that our proposed system is effective to detect anomalies in big data scenarios. Finally, we evaluate our proposed model on several academic datasets to compare with other models and find that it provides comparable performance with other state-of-the-art approaches.

Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar, Enamul Hoque, Jimmy Xiangji Huang

Pre-training a transformer-based model for the language modeling task in a large dataset and then fine-tuning it for downstream tasks has been found very useful in recent years. One major advantage of such pre-trained language models is that they can effectively absorb the context of each word in a sentence. However, for tasks such as the answer selection task, the pre-trained language models have not been extensively used yet. To investigate their effectiveness in such tasks, in this paper, we adopt the pre-trained Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformer (BERT) language model and fine-tune it on two Question Answering (QA) datasets and three Community Question Answering (CQA) datasets for the answer selection task. We find that fine-tuning the BERT model for the answer selection task is very effective and observe a maximum improvement of 13.1% in the QA datasets and 18.7% in the CQA datasets compared to the previous state-of-the-art.