Eirini Anthi

Othmane Belarbi, Theodoros Spyridopoulos, Eirini Anthi et al.

The vast increase of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies and the ever-evolving attack vectors have increased cyber-security risks dramatically. A common approach to implementing AI-based Intrusion Detection systems (IDSs) in distributed IoT systems is in a centralised manner. However, this approach may violate data privacy and prohibit IDS scalability. Therefore, intrusion detection solutions in IoT ecosystems need to move towards a decentralised direction. Federated Learning (FL) has attracted significant interest in recent years due to its ability to perform collaborative learning while preserving data confidentiality and locality. Nevertheless, most FL-based IDS for IoT systems are designed under unrealistic data distribution conditions. To that end, we design an experiment representative of the real world and evaluate the performance of an FL-based IDS. For our experiments, we rely on TON-IoT, a realistic IoT network traffic dataset, associating each IP address with a single FL client. Additionally, we explore pre-training and investigate various aggregation methods to mitigate the impact of data heterogeneity. Lastly, we benchmark our approach against a centralised solution. The comparison shows that the heterogeneous nature of the data has a considerable negative impact on the model's performance when trained in a distributed manner. However, in the case of a pre-trained initial global FL model, we demonstrate a performance improvement of over 20% (F1-score) compared to a randomly initiated global model.

Baskoro Adi Pratomo, Toby Jackson, Pete Burnap et al.

Analysing malware is important to understand how malicious software works and to develop appropriate detection and prevention methods. Dynamic analysis can overcome evasion techniques commonly used to bypass static analysis and provide insights into malware runtime activities. Much research on dynamic analysis focused on investigating machine-level information (e.g., CPU, memory, network usage) to identify whether a machine is running malicious activities. A malicious machine does not necessarily mean all running processes on the machine are also malicious. If we can isolate the malicious process instead of isolating the whole machine, we could kill the malicious process, and the machine can keep doing its job. Another challenge dynamic malware detection research faces is that the samples are executed in one machine without any background applications running. It is unrealistic as a computer typically runs many benign (background) applications when a malware incident happens. Our experiment with machine-level data shows that the existence of background applications decreases previous state-of-the-art accuracy by about 20.12% on average. We also proposed a process-level Recurrent Neural Network (RNN)-based detection model. Our proposed model performs better than the machine-level detection model; 0.049 increase in detection rate and a false-positive rate below 0.1.

Vasilis Ieropoulos, Eirini Anthi, Theodoros Spyridopoulos et al.

IoT devices particularly microcontrollers are challenged by their inherent limitations in processing capabilities, memory capacity, and energy conservation. Securing communication within IoT networks is further complicated by the heterogeneity of devices and the myriad of potential security threats. Our study introduces a lightweight model that utilises machine learning algorithms to achieve a notable detection accuracy of 99% using a decision tree method and 96% using a neural network in identifying cyber threats, including Denial of Service and Man-in-the-Middle attacks which make up the majority of the attacks these devices face. While the decision tree method offers higher accuracy, it requires more computational resources, whereas the neural network approach, despite a slightly lower accuracy, is more memory-efficient. Both methods enhance the real-time monitoring and defence of IoT networks, safeguarding the transmission of data. Additionally, our approach is tailored to conserve memory and optimise computational demands, rendering it suitable for deployment on microcontrollers with limited resources.

Othmane Belarbi, Theodoros Spyridopoulos, Eirini Anthi et al.

In this paper, a dataset of IoT network traffic is presented. Our dataset was generated by utilising the Gotham testbed, an emulated large-scale Internet of Things (IoT) network designed to provide a realistic and heterogeneous environment for network security research. The testbed includes 78 emulated IoT devices operating on various protocols, including MQTT, CoAP, and RTSP. Network traffic was captured in Packet Capture (PCAP) format using tcpdump, and both benign and malicious traffic were recorded. Malicious traffic was generated through scripted attacks, covering a variety of attack types, such as Denial of Service (DoS), Telnet Brute Force, Network Scanning, CoAP Amplification, and various stages of Command and Control (C&C) communication. The data were subsequently processed in Python for feature extraction using the Tshark tool, and the resulting data was converted to Comma Separated Values (CSV) format and labelled. The data repository includes the raw network traffic in PCAP format and the processed labelled data in CSV format. Our dataset was collected in a distributed manner, where network traffic was captured separately for each IoT device at the interface between the IoT gateway and the device. Our dataset was collected in a distributed manner, where network traffic was separately captured for each IoT device at the interface between the IoT gateway and the device. With its diverse traffic patterns and attack scenarios, this dataset provides a valuable resource for developing Intrusion Detection Systems and security mechanisms tailored to complex, large-scale IoT environments. The dataset is publicly available at Zenodo.

Lowri Williams, Eirini Anthi, Laura Arman et al.

Topic modelling is a text mining technique for identifying salient themes from a number of documents. The output is commonly a set of topics consisting of isolated tokens that often co-occur in such documents. Manual effort is often associated with interpreting a topic's description from such tokens. However, from a human's perspective, such outputs may not adequately provide enough information to infer the meaning of the topics; thus, their interpretability is often inaccurately understood. Although several studies have attempted to automatically extend topic descriptions as a means of enhancing the interpretation of topic models, they rely on external language sources that may become unavailable, must be kept up-to-date to generate relevant results, and present privacy issues when training on or processing data. This paper presents a novel approach towards extending the output of traditional topic modelling methods beyond a list of isolated tokens. This approach removes the dependence on external sources by using the textual data itself by extracting high-scoring keywords and mapping them to the topic model's token outputs. To measure the interpretability of the proposed outputs against those of the traditional topic modelling approach, independent annotators manually scored each output based on their quality and usefulness, as well as the efficiency of the annotation task. The proposed approach demonstrated higher quality and usefulness, as well as higher efficiency in the annotation task, in comparison to the outputs of a traditional topic modelling method, demonstrating an increase in their interpretability.

Abubakar Sadiq Mohammed, Philipp Reinecke, Pete Burnap et al.

The offshore oil and gas industry has recently been going through a digitalisation drive, with use of `smart' equipment using technologies like the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems (ICPS). There has also been a corresponding increase in cyber attacks targeted at oil and gas companies. Oil production offshore is usually in remote locations, requiring remote access and control. This is achieved by integrating ICPS, Supervisory, Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems, and IIoT technologies. A successful cyber attack against an oil and gas offshore asset could have a devastating impact on the environment, marine ecosystem and safety of personnel. Any disruption to the world's supply of oil and gas (O\&G) can also have an effect on oil prices and in turn, the global economy. This makes it important to secure the industry against cyber threats. We describe the potential cyberattack surface within the oil and gas industry, discussing emerging trends in the offshore sub-sector, and provide a timeline of known cyberattacks. We also present a case study of a subsea control system architecture typically used in offshore oil and gas operations and highlight potential vulnerabilities affecting the components of the system. This study is the first to provide a detailed analysis on the attack vectors in a subsea control system and is crucial to understanding key vulnerabilities, primarily to implement efficient mitigation methods that safeguard the safety of personnel and the environment when using such systems.

Petar Radanliev, David De Roure, Kevin Page et al.

Multiple governmental agencies and private organisations have made commitments for the colonisation of Mars. Such colonisation requires complex systems and infrastructure that could be very costly to repair or replace in cases of cyber attacks. This paper surveys deep learning algorithms, IoT cyber security and risk models, and established mathematical formulas to identify the best approach for developing a dynamic and self adapting system for predictive cyber risk analytics supported with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning and real time intelligence in edge computing. The paper presents a new mathematical approach for integrating concepts for cognition engine design, edge computing and Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to automate anomaly detection. This engine instigates a step change by applying Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning embedded at the edge of IoT networks, to deliver safe and functional real time intelligence for predictive cyber risk analytics. This will enhance capacities for risk analytics and assists in the creation of a comprehensive and systematic understanding of the opportunities and threats that arise when edge computing nodes are deployed, and when Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning technologies are migrated to the periphery of the internet and into local IoT networks.

Eirini Anthi, Lowri Williams, Matilda Rhode et al.

The proliferation and application of machine learning based Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) have allowed for more flexibility and efficiency in the automated detection of cyber attacks in Industrial Control Systems (ICS). However, the introduction of such IDSs has also created an additional attack vector; the learning models may also be subject to cyber attacks, otherwise referred to as Adversarial Machine Learning (AML). Such attacks may have severe consequences in ICS systems, as adversaries could potentially bypass the IDS. This could lead to delayed attack detection which may result in infrastructure damages, financial loss, and even loss of life. This paper explores how adversarial learning can be used to target supervised models by generating adversarial samples using the Jacobian-based Saliency Map attack and exploring classification behaviours. The analysis also includes the exploration of how such samples can support the robustness of supervised models using adversarial training. An authentic power system dataset was used to support the experiments presented herein. Overall, the classification performance of two widely used classifiers, Random Forest and J48, decreased by 16 and 20 percentage points when adversarial samples were present. Their performances improved following adversarial training, demonstrating their robustness towards such attacks.

Petar Radanliev, David De Roure, Max Van Kleek et al.

The Internet of Things (IoT) triggers new types of cyber risks. Therefore, the integration of new IoT devices and services requires a self-assessment of IoT cyber security posture. By security posture this article refers to the cybersecurity strength of an organisation to predict, prevent and respond to cyberthreats. At present, there is a gap in the state of the art, because there are no self-assessment methods for quantifying IoT cyber risk posture. To address this gap, an empirical analysis is performed of 12 cyber risk assessment approaches. The results and the main findings from the analysis is presented as the current and a target risk state for IoT systems, followed by conclusions and recommendations on a transformation roadmap, describing how IoT systems can achieve the target state with a new goal-oriented dependency model. By target state, we refer to the cyber security target that matches the generic security requirements of an organisation. The research paper studies and adapts four alternatives for IoT risk assessment and identifies the goal-oriented dependency modelling as a dominant approach among the risk assessment models studied. The new goal-oriented dependency model in this article enables the assessment of uncontrollable risk states in complex IoT systems and can be used for a quantitative self-assessment of IoT cyber risk posture.