Brij B. Gupta

Lei Zhang, Shuaimin Jiang, Xiajiong Shen et al.

With the continuous development of industrial IoT (IIoT) technology, network security is becoming more and more important. And intrusion detection is an important part of its security. However, since the amount of attack traffic is very small compared to normal traffic, this imbalance makes intrusion detection in it very difficult. To address this imbalance, an intrusion detection system called pretraining Wasserstein generative adversarial network intrusion detection system (PWG-IDS) is proposed in this paper. This system is divided into two main modules: 1) In this module, we introduce the pretraining mechanism in the Wasserstein generative adversarial network with gradient penalty (WGAN-GP) for the first time, firstly using the normal network traffic to train the WGAN-GP, and then inputting the imbalance data into the pre-trained WGAN-GP to retrain and generate the final required data. 2) Intrusion detection module: We use LightGBM as the classification algorithm to detect attack traffic in IIoT networks. The experimental results show that our proposed PWG-IDS outperforms other models, with F1-scores of 99% and 89% on the 2 datasets, respectively. And the pretraining mechanism we proposed can also be widely used in other GANs, providing a new way of thinking for the training of GANs.

Krishna Yadav, B. B Gupta

In recent times, federated machine learning has been very useful in building intelligent intrusion detection systems for IoT devices. As IoT devices are equipped with a security architecture vulnerable to various attacks, these security loopholes may bring a risk during federated training of decentralized IoT devices. Adversaries can take control over these IoT devices and inject false gradients to degrade the global model performance. In this paper, we have proposed an approach that detects the adversaries with the help of a clustering algorithm. After clustering, it further rewards the clients for detecting honest and malicious clients. Our proposed gradient filtration approach does not require any processing power from the client-side and does not use excessive bandwidth, making it very much feasible for IoT devices. Further, our approach has been very successful in boosting the global model accuracy, up to 99% even in the presence of 40% adversaries.

Zhuzhu Wang, Yilong Yang, Yang Liu et al.

The application of federated extreme gradient boosting to mobile crowdsensing apps brings several benefits, in particular high performance on efficiency and classification. However, it also brings a new challenge for data and model privacy protection. Besides it being vulnerable to Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) based user data reconstruction attack, there is not the existing architecture that considers how to preserve model privacy. In this paper, we propose a secret sharing based federated learning architecture FedXGB to achieve the privacy-preserving extreme gradient boosting for mobile crowdsensing. Specifically, we first build a secure classification and regression tree (CART) of XGBoost using secret sharing. Then, we propose a secure prediction protocol to protect the model privacy of XGBoost in mobile crowdsensing. We conduct a comprehensive theoretical analysis and extensive experiments to evaluate the security, effectiveness, and efficiency of FedXGB. The results indicate that FedXGB is secure against the honest-but-curious adversaries and attains less than 1% accuracy loss compared with the original XGBoost model.

B. B. Gupta, Nalin Asanka Gamagedara Arachchilage, Konstantinos E. Psannis

Internet technology is so pervasive today, for example, from online social networking to online banking, it has made people's lives more comfortable. Due the growth of Internet technology, security threats to systems and networks are relentlessly inventive. One such a serious threat is "phishing", in which, attackers attempt to steal the user's credentials using fake emails or websites or both. It is true that both industry and academia are working hard to develop solutions to combat against phishing threats. It is therefore very important that organisations to pay attention to end-user awareness in phishing threat prevention. Therefore, the aim of our paper is twofold. First, we will discuss the history of phishing attacks and the attackers' motivation in details. Then, we will provide taxonomy of various types of phishing attacks. Second, we will provide taxonomy of various solutions proposed in literature to protect users from phishing based on the attacks identified in our taxonomy. Moreover, we have also discussed impact of phishing attacks in Internet of Things (IoTs). We conclude our paper discussing various issues and challenges that still exist in the literature, which are important to fight against with phishing threats.

Awanthika Senarath, Nalin Asanka Gamagedara Arachchilage, B. B. Gupta

In this paper, we describe ongoing work that focuses on improving the strength of the answers to security questions. The ultimate goal of the proposed research is to evaluate the possibility of nudging users towards strong answers for ubiquitous security questions. In this research we are proposing a user interface design for fallback authentication to encourage users to design stronger answers. The proposed design involves visual feedback to the user based on mnemonics which attempts to give visual feedback to the user on the strength of the answer provided and guide the user to creatively design a stronger answer.

Priyanka Negi, Anupama Mishra, B. B. Gupta

Tremendous and extraordinary growths in the field of internet, intranet, extranet and its users have developed an innovative era of great global competition and contention. Denial of service attack by multiple nodes is accomplished of disturbing the services of rival servers. The attack can be for multiple reasons. So it is a major threat for cloud environment. Due to low effectiveness and large storage conventional defending approaches cannot be easily applied in cloud security. The effects of various attacks can decrease the influence of a cloud. So, in view of this challenge task, this paper aims at enhancing a proposed method for cloud security. We propose a modification to the confidence Based Filtering method (CBF) which is investigated for cloud computing environment based on correlation pattern to mitigate DDoS attacks on Cloud. The modification introduces nominal additional bandwidth and tries to increase the processing speed of the victim initiated server.

Ammar ALmomani, B. B. Gupta, Tat-Chee Wan et al.

Phishing is a kind of attack in which criminals use spoofed emails and fraudulent web sites to trick financial organization and customers. Criminals try to lure online users by convincing them to reveal the username, passwords, credit card number and updating account information or fill billing information.

B. B. Gupta, R. C. Joshi, Manoj Misra

The significance of the DDoS problem and the increased occurrence, sophistication and strength of attacks has led to the dawn of numerous prevention mechanisms. Each proposed prevention mechanism has some unique advantages and disadvantages over the others. In this paper, we present a classification of available mechanisms that are proposed in literature on preventing Internet services from possible DDoS attacks and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each mechanism. This provides better understanding of the problem and enables a security administrator to effectively equip his arsenal with proper prevention mechanisms for fighting against DDoS threat.

Esraa Alomari, Selvakumar Manickam, B. B. Gupta et al.

Botnets are prevailing mechanisms for the facilitation of the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on computer networks or applications. Currently, Botnet-based DDoS attacks on the application layer are latest and most problematic trends in network security threats. Botnet-based DDoS attacks on the application layer limits resources, curtails revenue, and yields customer dissatisfaction, among others. DDoS attacks are among the most difficult problems to resolve online, especially, when the target is the Web server. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study to show the danger of Botnet-based DDoS attacks on application layer, especially on the Web server and the increased incidents of such attacks that has evidently increased recently. Botnet-based DDoS attacks incidents and revenue losses of famous companies and government websites are also described. This provides better understanding of the problem, current solution space, and future research scope to defend against such attacks efficiently.

B. B. Gupta, R. C. Joshi, Manoj Misra

Denial of service (DoS) attacks and more particularly the distributed ones (DDoS) are one of the latest threat and pose a grave danger to users, organizations and infrastructures of the Internet. Several schemes have been proposed on how to detect some of these attacks, but they suffer from a range of problems, some of them being impractical and others not being effective against these attacks. This paper reports the design principles and evaluation results of our proposed framework that autonomously detects and accurately characterizes a wide range of flooding DDoS attacks in ISP network. Attacks are detected by the constant monitoring of propagation of abrupt traffic changes inside ISP network. For this, a newly designed flow-volume based approach (FVBA) is used to construct profile of the traffic normally seen in the network, and identify anomalies whenever traffic goes out of profile. Consideration of varying tolerance factors make proposed detection system scalable to the varying network conditions and attack loads in real time. Six-sigma method is used to identify threshold values accurately for malicious flows characterization. FVBA has been extensively evaluated in a controlled test-bed environment. Detection thresholds and efficiency is justified using receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curve. For validation, KDD 99, a publicly available benchmark dataset is used. The results show that our proposed system gives a drastic improvement in terms of detection and false alarm rate.

B. B. Gupta, R. C. Joshi, Manoj Misra

In this paper, an analytical model for DDoS attacks detection is proposed, in which propagation of abrupt traffic changes inside public domain is monitored to detect a wide range of DDoS attacks. Although, various statistical measures can be used to construct profile of the traffic normally seen in the network to identify anomalies whenever traffic goes out of profile, we have selected volume and flow measure. Consideration of varying tolerance factors make proposed detection system scalable to the varying network conditions and attack loads in real time. NS-2 network simulator on Linux platform is used as simulation testbed. Simulation results show that our proposed solution gives a drastic improvement in terms of detection rate and false positive rate. However, the mammoth volume generated by DDoS attacks pose the biggest challenge in terms of memory and computational overheads as far as monitoring and analysis of traffic at single point connecting victim is concerned. To address this problem, a distributed cooperative technique is proposed that distributes memory and computational overheads to all edge routers for detecting a wide range of DDoS attacks at early stage.

B. B. Gupta, Manoj Misra, R. C. Joshi

Disruption from service caused by DDoS attacks is an immense threat to Internet today. These attacks can disrupt the availability of Internet services completely, by eating either computational or communication resources through sheer volume of packets sent from distributed locations in a coordinated manner or graceful degradation of network performance by sending attack traffic at low rate. In this paper, we describe a novel framework that deals with the detection of variety of DDoS attacks by monitoring propagation of abrupt traffic changes inside ISP Domain and then characterizes flows that carry attack traffic. Two statistical metrics namely, Volume and Flow are used as parameters to detect DDoS attacks. Effectiveness of an anomaly based detection and characterization system highly depends on accuracy of threshold value settings. Inaccurate threshold values cause a large number of false positives and negatives. Therefore, in our scheme, Six-Sigma and varying tolerance factor methods are used to identify threshold values accurately and dynamically for various statistical metrics. NS-2 network simulator on Linux platform is used as simulation testbed to validate effectiveness of proposed approach. Different attack scenarios are implemented by varying total number of zombie machines and at different attack strengths. The comparison with volume-based approach clearly indicates the supremacy of our proposed system.

B. B. Gupta, R. C. Joshi, Manoj Misra

Anomaly-based DDoS detection systems construct profile of the traffic normally seen in the network, and identify anomalies whenever traffic deviate from normal profile beyond a threshold. This extend of deviation is normally not utilised. This paper reports the evaluation results of proposed approach that utilises this extend of deviation from detection threshold to estimate strength of DDoS attack using various regression models. A relationship is established between number of zombies and observed deviation in sample entropy. Various statistical performance measures, such as coefficient of determination (R2), coefficient of correlation (CC), sum of square error (SSE), mean square error (MSE), root mean square error (RMSE), normalised mean square error (NMSE), Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency index (η) and mean absolute error (MAE) are used to measure the performance of various regression models. Internet type topologies used for simulation are generated using transit-stub model of GT-ITM topology generator. NS-2 network simulator on Linux platform is used as simulation test bed for launching DDoS attacks with varied attack strength. A comparative study is performed using different regression models for estimating strength of DDoS attack. The simulation results are promising as we are able to estimate strength of DDoS attack efficiently with very less error rate using various regression models.