Khaled M. Khan

Maede Zolanvari, Zebo Yang, Khaled Khan et al.

Despite AI's significant growth, its "black box" nature creates challenges in generating adequate trust. Thus, it is seldom utilized as a standalone unit in IoT high-risk applications, such as critical industrial infrastructures, medical systems, and financial applications, etc. Explainable AI (XAI) has emerged to help with this problem. However, designing appropriately fast and accurate XAI is still challenging, especially in numerical applications. Here, we propose a universal XAI model named Transparency Relying Upon Statistical Theory (TRUST), which is model-agnostic, high-performing, and suitable for numerical applications. Simply put, TRUST XAI models the statistical behavior of the AI's outputs in an AI-based system. Factor analysis is used to transform the input features into a new set of latent variables. We use mutual information to rank these variables and pick only the most influential ones on the AI's outputs and call them "representatives" of the classes. Then we use multi-modal Gaussian distributions to determine the likelihood of any new sample belonging to each class. We demonstrate the effectiveness of TRUST in a case study on cybersecurity of the industrial Internet of things (IIoT) using three different cybersecurity datasets. As IIoT is a prominent application that deals with numerical data. The results show that TRUST XAI provides explanations for new random samples with an average success rate of 98%. Compared with LIME, a popular XAI model, TRUST is shown to be superior in the context of performance, speed, and the method of explainability. In the end, we also show how TRUST is explained to the user.

Deval Bhamare, Maede Zolanvari, Aiman Erbad et al.

Industrial Control System (ICS) is a general term that includes supervisory control & data acquisition (SCADA) systems, distributed control systems (DCS), and other control system configurations such as programmable logic controllers (PLC). ICSs are often found in the industrial sectors and critical infrastructures, such as nuclear and thermal plants, water treatment facilities, power generation, heavy industries, and distribution systems. Though ICSs were kept isolated from the Internet for so long, significant achievable business benefits are driving a convergence between ICSs and the Internet as well as information technology (IT) environments, such as cloud computing. As a result, ICSs have been exposed to the attack vectors used in the majority of cyber-attacks. However, ICS devices are inherently much less secure against such advanced attack scenarios. A compromise to ICS can lead to enormous physical damage and danger to human lives. In this work, we have a close look at the shift of the ICS from stand-alone systems to cloud-based environments. Then we discuss the major works, from industry and academia towards the development of the secure ICSs, especially applicability of the machine learning techniques for the ICS cyber-security. The work may help to address the challenges of securing industrial processes, particularly while migrating them to the cloud environments.

Maede Zolanvari, Marcio A. Teixeira, Lav Gupta et al.

It is critical to secure the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) devices because of potentially devastating consequences in case of an attack. Machine learning and big data analytics are the two powerful leverages for analyzing and securing the Internet of Things (IoT) technology. By extension, these techniques can help improve the security of the IIoT systems as well. In this paper, we first present common IIoT protocols and their associated vulnerabilities. Then, we run a cyber-vulnerability assessment and discuss the utilization of machine learning in countering these susceptibilities. Following that, a literature review of the available intrusion detection solutions using machine learning models is presented. Finally, we discuss our case study, which includes details of a real-world testbed that we have built to conduct cyber-attacks and to design an intrusion detection system (IDS). We deploy backdoor, command injection, and Structured Query Language (SQL) injection attacks against the system and demonstrate how a machine learning based anomaly detection system can perform well in detecting these attacks. We have evaluated the performance through representative metrics to have a fair point of view on the effectiveness of the methods.

Seoungmo An, Taehoon Eom, Jong Sou Park et al.

Cloud computing has been adopted widely, providing on-demand computing resources to improve perfornance and reduce the operational costs. However, these new functionalities also bring new ways to exploit the cloud computing environment. To assess the security of the cloud, graphical security models can be used, such as Attack Graphs and Attack Trees. However, existing models do not consider all types of threats, and also automating the security assessment functions are difficult. In this paper, we propose a new security assessment tool for the cloud named CloudSafe, an automated security assessment for the cloud. The CloudSafe tool collates various tools and frameworks to automate the security assessment process. To demonstrate the applicability of the CloudSafe, we conducted security assessment in Amazon AWS, where our experimental results showed that we can effectively gather security information of the cloud and carry out security assessment to produce security reports. Users and cloud service providers can use the security report generated by the CloudSafe to understand the security posture of the cloud being used/provided.