Suboptimal Feature Selection Techniques for Effective Malicious Traffic Detection on Lightweight Devices

With the advancement of wireless network technology,vast amounts of traffic have been generated,and malicious traffic attacks that threaten the network environment are becoming increasingly sophisticated.While signature-based detection methods,static analysis,and dynamic analysis techniques have been previously explored for malicious traffic detection,they have limitations in identifying diversified malware traffic patterns.Recent research has been focused on the application of machine learning to detect these patterns.However,applying machine learning to lightweight devices like IoT devices is challenging because of the high computational demands and complexity involved in the learning process.In this study,we examined methods for effectively utilizing machine learning-based malicious traffic detection approaches for lightweight devices.We introduced the suboptimal feature selection model(SFSM),a feature selection technique designed to reduce complexity while maintaining the effectiveness of malicious traffic detection.Detection performance was evaluated on various malicious traffic,benign,exploits,and generic,using the UNSW-NB15 dataset and SFSM sub-optimized hyperparameters for feature selection and narrowed the search scope to encompass all features.SFSM improved learning performance while minimizing complexity by considering feature selection and exhaustive search as two steps,a problem not considered in conventional models.Our experimental results showed that the detection accuracy was improved by approximately 20%compared to the random model,and the reduction in accuracy compared to the greedy model,which performs an exhaustive search on all features,was kept within 6%.Additionally,latency and complexity were reduced by approximately 96%and 99.78%,respectively,compared to the greedy model.This study demonstrates that malicious traffic can be effectively detected even in lightweight device environments.SFSM verified the possibility of detecting various attack traffic on lightweight devices.

SCIRD: Revealing Infection of Malicious Software in Edge Computing-Enabled IoT Networks

The Internet of Things(IoT)has characteristics such as node mobility,node heterogeneity,link heterogeneity,and topology heterogeneity.In the face of the IoT characteristics and the explosive growth of IoT nodes,which brings about large-scale data processing requirements,edge computing architecture has become an emerging network architecture to support IoT applications due to its ability to provide powerful computing capabilities and good service functions.However,the defense mechanism of Edge Computing-enabled IoT Nodes(ECIoTNs)is still weak due to their limited resources,so that they are susceptible to malicious software spread,which can compromise data confidentiality and network service availability.Facing this situation,we put forward an epidemiology-based susceptible-curb-infectious-removed-dead(SCIRD)model.Then,we analyze the dynamics of ECIoTNs with different infection levels under different initial conditions to obtain the dynamic differential equations.Additionally,we establish the presence of equilibrium states in the SCIRD model.Furthermore,we conduct an analysis of the model’s stability and examine the conditions under which malicious software will either spread or disappear within Edge Computing-enabled IoT(ECIoT)networks.Lastly,we validate the efficacy and superiority of the SCIRD model through MATLAB simulations.These research findings offer a theoretical foundation for suppressing the propagation of malicious software in ECIoT networks.The experimental results indicate that the theoretical SCIRD model has instructive significance,deeply revealing the principles of malicious software propagation in ECIoT networks.This study solves a challenging security problem of ECIoT networks by determining the malicious software propagation threshold,which lays the foundation for buildingmore secure and reliable ECIoT networks.

Detecting Malicious Uniform Resource Locators Using an Applied Intelligence Framework

The potential of text analytics is revealed by Machine Learning(ML)and Natural Language Processing(NLP)techniques.In this paper,we propose an NLP framework that is applied to multiple datasets to detect malicious Uniform Resource Locators(URLs).Three categories of features,both ML and Deep Learning(DL)algorithms and a ranking schema are included in the proposed framework.We apply frequency and prediction-based embeddings,such as hash vectorizer,Term Frequency-Inverse Dense Frequency(TF-IDF)and predictors,word to vector-word2vec(continuous bag of words,skip-gram)from Google,to extract features from text.Further,we apply more state-of-the-art methods to create vectorized features,such as GloVe.Additionally,feature engineering that is specific to URL structure is deployed to detect scams and other threats.For framework assessment,four ranking indicators are weighted:computational time and performance as accuracy,F1 score and type error II.For the computational time,we propose a new metric-Feature Building Time(FBT)as the cutting-edge feature builders(like doc2vec or GloVe)require more time.By applying the proposed assessment step,the skip-gram algorithm of word2vec surpasses other feature builders in performance.Additionally,eXtreme Gradient Boost(XGB)outperforms other classifiers.With this setup,we attain an accuracy of 99.5%and an F1 score of 0.99.

A GAN-EfficientNet-Based Traceability Method for Malicious Code Variant Families

Due to the diversity and unpredictability of changes in malicious code,studying the traceability of variant families remains challenging.In this paper,we propose a GAN-EfficientNetV2-based method for tracing families of malicious code variants.This method leverages the similarity in layouts and textures between images of malicious code variants from the same source and their original family of malicious code images.The method includes a lightweight classifier and a simulator.The classifier utilizes the enhanced EfficientNetV2 to categorize malicious code images and can be easily deployed on mobile,embedded,and other devices.The simulator utilizes an enhanced generative adversarial network to simulate different variants of malicious code and generates datasets to validate the model’s performance.This process helps identify model vulnerabilities and security risks,facilitating model enhancement and development.The classifier achieves 98.61%and 97.59%accuracy on the MMCC dataset and Malevis dataset,respectively.The simulator’s generated image of malicious code variants has an FID value of 155.44 and an IS value of 1.72±0.42.The classifier’s accuracy for tracing the family of malicious code variants is as high as 90.29%,surpassing that of mainstream neural network models.This meets the current demand for high generalization and anti-obfuscation abilities in malicious code classification models due to the rapid evolution of malicious code.

A New Malicious Code Classification Method for the Security of Financial Software

The field of finance heavily relies on cybersecurity to safeguard its systems and clients from harmful software.The identification of malevolent code within financial software is vital for protecting both the financial system and individual clients.Nevertheless,present detection models encounter limitations in their ability to identify malevolent code and its variations,all while encompassing a multitude of parameters.To overcome these obsta-cles,we introduce a lean model for classifying families of malevolent code,formulated on Ghost-DenseNet-SE.This model integrates the Ghost module,DenseNet,and the squeeze-and-excitation(SE)channel domain attention mechanism.It substitutes the standard convolutional layer in DenseNet with the Ghost module,thereby diminishing the model’s size and augmenting recognition speed.Additionally,the channel domain attention mechanism assigns distinctive weights to feature channels,facilitating the extraction of pivotal characteristics of malevolent code and bolstering detection precision.Experimental outcomes on the Malimg dataset indicate that the model attained an accuracy of 99.14%in discerning families of malevolent code,surpassing AlexNet(97.8%)and The visual geometry group network(VGGNet)(96.16%).The proposed model exhibits reduced parameters,leading to decreased model complexity alongside enhanced classification accuracy,rendering it a valuable asset for categorizing malevolent code.

Lightweight Malicious Code Classification Method Based on Improved Squeeze Net

With the growth of the Internet,more and more business is being done online,for example,online offices,online education and so on.While this makes people’s lives more convenient,it also increases the risk of the network being attacked by malicious code.Therefore,it is important to identify malicious codes on computer systems efficiently.However,most of the existing malicious code detection methods have two problems:(1)The ability of the model to extract features is weak,resulting in poor model performance.(2)The large scale of model data leads to difficulties deploying on devices with limited resources.Therefore,this paper proposes a lightweight malicious code identification model Lightweight Malicious Code Classification Method Based on Improved SqueezeNet(LCMISNet).In this paper,the MFire lightweight feature extraction module is constructed by proposing a feature slicing module and a multi-size depthwise separable convolution module.The feature slicing module reduces the number of parameters by grouping features.The multi-size depthwise separable convolution module reduces the number of parameters and enhances the feature extraction capability by replacing the standard convolution with depthwise separable convolution with different convolution kernel sizes.In addition,this paper also proposes a feature splicing module to connect the MFire lightweight feature extraction module based on the feature reuse and constructs the lightweight model LCMISNet.The malicious code recognition accuracy of LCMISNet on the BIG 2015 dataset and the Malimg dataset reaches 98.90% and 99.58%,respectively.It proves that LCMISNet has a powerful malicious code recognition performance.In addition,compared with other network models,LCMISNet has better performance,and a lower number of parameters and computations.

BSTFNet:An Encrypted Malicious Traffic Classification Method Integrating Global Semantic and Spatiotemporal Features

While encryption technology safeguards the security of network communications,malicious traffic also uses encryption protocols to obscure its malicious behavior.To address the issues of traditional machine learning methods relying on expert experience and the insufficient representation capabilities of existing deep learning methods for encrypted malicious traffic,we propose an encrypted malicious traffic classification method that integrates global semantic features with local spatiotemporal features,called BERT-based Spatio-Temporal Features Network(BSTFNet).At the packet-level granularity,the model captures the global semantic features of packets through the attention mechanism of the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers(BERT)model.At the byte-level granularity,we initially employ the Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Unit(BiGRU)model to extract temporal features from bytes,followed by the utilization of the Text Convolutional Neural Network(TextCNN)model with multi-sized convolution kernels to extract local multi-receptive field spatial features.The fusion of features from both granularities serves as the ultimate multidimensional representation of malicious traffic.Our approach achieves accuracy and F1-score of 99.39%and 99.40%,respectively,on the publicly available USTC-TFC2016 dataset,and effectively reduces sample confusion within the Neris and Virut categories.The experimental results demonstrate that our method has outstanding representation and classification capabilities for encrypted malicious traffic.

PowerDetector:Malicious PowerShell Script Family Classification Based on Multi-Modal Semantic Fusion and Deep Learning

Power Shell has been widely deployed in fileless malware and advanced persistent threat(APT)attacks due to its high stealthiness and live-off-theland technique.However,existing works mainly focus on deobfuscation and malicious detection,lacking the malicious Power Shell families classification and behavior analysis.Moreover,the state-of-the-art methods fail to capture fine-grained features and semantic relationships,resulting in low robustness and accuracy.To this end,we propose Power Detector,a novel malicious Power Shell script detector based on multimodal semantic fusion and deep learning.Specifically,we design four feature extraction methods to extract key features from character,token,abstract syntax tree(AST),and semantic knowledge graph.Then,we intelligently design four embeddings(i.e.,Char2Vec,Token2Vec,AST2Vec,and Rela2Vec) and construct a multi-modal fusion algorithm to concatenate feature vectors from different views.Finally,we propose a combined model based on transformer and CNN-Bi LSTM to implement Power Shell family detection.Our experiments with five types of Power Shell attacks show that PowerDetector can accurately detect various obfuscated and stealth PowerShell scripts,with a 0.9402 precision,a 0.9358 recall,and a 0.9374 F1-score.Furthermore,through singlemodal and multi-modal comparison experiments,we demonstrate that PowerDetector’s multi-modal embedding and deep learning model can achieve better accuracy and even identify more unknown attacks.

Detecting While Accessing:A Semi-Supervised Learning-Based Approach for Malicious Traffic Detection in Internet of Things

In the upcoming large-scale Internet of Things(Io T),it is increasingly challenging to defend against malicious traffic,due to the heterogeneity of Io T devices and the diversity of Io T communication protocols.In this paper,we propose a semi-supervised learning-based approach to detect malicious traffic at the access side.It overcomes the resource-bottleneck problem of traditional malicious traffic defenders which are deployed at the victim side,and also is free of labeled traffic data in model training.Specifically,we design a coarse-grained behavior model of Io T devices by self-supervised learning with unlabeled traffic data.Then,we fine-tune this model to improve its accuracy in malicious traffic detection by adopting a transfer learning method using a small amount of labeled data.Experimental results show that our method can achieve the accuracy of 99.52%and the F1-score of 99.52%with only 1%of the labeled training data based on the CICDDoS2019 dataset.Moreover,our method outperforms the stateof-the-art supervised learning-based methods in terms of accuracy,precision,recall and F1-score with 1%of the training data.

A Study of Ensemble Feature Selection and Adversarial Training for Malicious User Detection

The continuously booming of information technology has shed light on developing a variety of communication networks,multimedia,social networks and Internet of Things applications.However,users inevitably suffer from the intrusion of malicious users.Some studies focus on static characteristics of malicious users,which is easy to be bypassed by camouflaged malicious users.In this paper,we present a malicious user detection method based on ensemble feature selection and adversarial training.Firstly,the feature selection alleviates the dimension disaster problem and achieves more accurate classification performance.Secondly,we embed features into the multidimensional space and aggregate it into a feature map to encode the explicit content preference and implicit interaction preference.Thirdly,we use an effective ensemble learning which could avoid over-fitting and has good noise resistance.Finally,we propose a datadriven neural network detection model with the regularization technique adversarial training to deeply analyze the characteristics.It simplifies the parameters,obtaining more robust interaction features and pattern features.We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach with numerical simulation results for malicious user detection,where the robustness issues are notable concerns.

Malicious URL Classification Using Artificial Fish Swarm Optimization and Deep Learning

Cybersecurity-related solutions have become familiar since it ensures security and privacy against cyberattacks in this digital era.Malicious Uniform Resource Locators(URLs)can be embedded in email or Twitter and used to lure vulnerable internet users to implement malicious data in their systems.This may result in compromised security of the systems,scams,and other such cyberattacks.These attacks hijack huge quantities of the available data,incurring heavy financial loss.At the same time,Machine Learning(ML)and Deep Learning(DL)models paved the way for designing models that can detect malicious URLs accurately and classify them.With this motivation,the current article develops an Artificial Fish Swarm Algorithm(AFSA)with Deep Learning Enabled Malicious URL Detection and Classification(AFSADL-MURLC)model.The presented AFSADL-MURLC model intends to differentiate the malicious URLs from genuine URLs.To attain this,AFSADL-MURLC model initially carries out data preprocessing and makes use of glove-based word embedding technique.In addition,the created vector model is then passed onto Gated Recurrent Unit(GRU)classification to recognize the malicious URLs.Finally,AFSA is applied to the proposed model to enhance the efficiency of GRU model.The proposed AFSADL-MURLC technique was experimentally validated using benchmark dataset sourced from Kaggle repository.The simulation results confirmed the supremacy of the proposed AFSADL-MURLC model over recent approaches under distinct measures.

The Malicious Uses of Artificial Intelligence(MUAI)and Psychological Security in the Case of Iran

Artificial intelligence(AI)is attracted great attention in the world,because its uses are going to be prevailed in many areas and issues.As a result,keeping the situation to use AI in the positive and optimistic manner would be meant that it is well-protected the society’s mentality.The malicious uses of AI in the case of Iran are mattered by the three issues-the huge sanctions imposed to Iran by the Western countries,the psychological dissonance there is in the Iran’s decision making process,and by ontological security perceived by the Iran’s officials.It is tried to examine them in accordance with the technical,cognitive,and the institutional levels of AI.

Easy Paying Optimizing payment options for international visitors to China

As of January 31,2024,China had concluded mutual visa exemption agreements covering different types of passports with 157 countries,reached agreements or arrangements on simplified visa procedures with 44 countries,and enjoyed comprehensive mutual visa exemptions with 23 countries including Thailand,Singapore,Maldives,and the United Arab Emirates.

Are You Willing to Pay to Go to the Supermarket?

In recent yea rs,t raditiona l offline supermarkets are facing big challenges,and warehouse membership superma rkets(hereinafter referred to as membership supermarkets)are quickly gaining p opu l a r it y.Ma ny t r ad it iona l supermarkets have become membership supermarkets,and even many retail enterprises have entered this field.

Digital Payments Bring Better Travel Experience in China

CHINA’S visa-free policy keeps expanding and the country has entered a new era of welcoming visitors from an increasing global reach.By January 1,2024,China had inked mutual visa exemption agreements with 157 countries,simplified visa procedures with 44 countries,and enjoyed comprehensive mutual visa exemptions with 23 countries,including Thailand,Singapore,the Maldives,and the United Arab Emirates.

Labeling Malicious Communication Samples Based on Semi-Supervised Deep Neural Network

The limited labeled sample data in the field of advanced security threats detection seriously restricts the effective development of research work.Learning the sample labels from the labeled and unlabeled data has received a lot of research attention and various universal labeling methods have been proposed.However,the labeling task of malicious communication samples targeted at advanced threats has to face the two practical challenges:the difficulty of extracting effective features in advance and the complexity of the actual sample types.To address these problems,we proposed a sample labeling method for malicious communication based on semi-supervised deep neural network.This method supports continuous learning and optimization feature representation while labeling sample,and can handle uncertain samples that are outside the concerned sample types.According to the experimental results,our proposed deep neural network can automatically learn effective feature representation,and the validity of features is close to or even higher than that of features which extracted based on expert knowledge.Furthermore,our proposed method can achieve the labeling accuracy of 97.64%~98.50%,which is more accurate than the train-then-detect,kNN and LPA methodsin any labeled-sample proportion condition.The problem of insufficient labeled samples in many network attack detecting scenarios,and our proposed work can function as a reference for the sample labeling tasks in the similar real-world scenarios.

Improving Knowledge Based Spam Detection Methods: The Effect of Malicious Related Features in Imbalance Data Distribution

Spam is no longer just commercial unsolicited email messages that waste our time, it consumes network traffic and mail servers’ storage. Furthermore, spam has become a major component of several attack vectors including attacks such as phishing, cross-site scripting, cross-site request forgery and malware infection. Statistics show that the amount of spam containing malicious contents increased compared to the one advertising legitimate products and services. In this paper, the issue of spam detection is investigated with the aim to develop an efficient method to identify spam email based on the analysis of the content of email messages. We identify a set of features that have a considerable number of malicious related features. Our goal is to study the effect of these features in helping the classical classifiers in identifying spam emails. To make the problem more challenging, we developed spam classification models based on imbalanced data where spam emails form the rare class with only 16.5% of the total emails. Different metrics were utilized in the evaluation of the developed models. Results show noticeable improvement of spam classification models when trained by dataset that includes malicious related features.

Malicious Code Modeling and Analysis in Weighted Scale-Free Networks

We study the detailed malicious code propagating process in scale-free networks with link weights that denotes traffic between two nodes. It is found that the propagating velocity reaches a peak rapidly then decays in a power-law form, which is different from the well-known result in unweighted network case. Simulation results show that the nodes with larger strength are preferential to be infected, but the hierarchical dynamics are not clearly found. The simulation results also show that larger dispersion of weight of networks leads to slower propagating, which indicates that malicious code propagates more quickly in unweighted scale-free networks than in weighted scale-free networks under the same condition. These results show that not only the topology of networks but also the link weights affect the malicious propagating process.

A Malicious and Malfunctioning Node Detection Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks are often used to monitor physical and environmental conditions in various regions where human access is limited. Due to limited resources and deployment in hostile environment, they are vulnerable to faults and malicious attacks. The sensor nodes affected or compromised can send erroneous data or misleading reports to base station. Hence identifying malicious and faulty nodes in an accurate and timely manner is important to provide reliable functioning of the networks. In this paper, we present a malicious and malfunctioning node detection scheme using dual-weighted trust evaluation in a hierarchical sensor network. Malicious nodes are effectively detected in the presence of natural faults and noise without sacrificing fault-free nodes. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms some existing schemes in terms of mis-detection rate and event detection accuracy, while maintaining comparable performance in malicious node detection rate and false alarm rate.

Are blockchains immune to all malicious attacks?

Background:In recent years,blockchain technology has attracted considerable attention.It records cryptographic transactions in a public ledger that is difficult to alter and compromise because of the distributed consensus.As a result,blockchain is believed to resist fraud and hacking.Results:This work explores the types of fraud and malicious activities that can be prevented by blockchain technology and identifies attacks to which blockchain remains vulnerable.Conclusions:This study recommends appropriate defensive measures and calls for further research into the techniques for fighting malicious activities related to blockchains.