arXiv subjects

Nour Moustafa

Publications and source records attributed to Nour Moustafa.

26 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2019

A Systemic IoT-Fog-Cloud Architecture for Big-Data Analytics and Cyber Security Systems: A Review of Fog Computing

Abstract--- With the rapid growth of the Internet of Things (IoT), current Cloud systems face various drawbacks such as lack of mobility support, location-awareness, geo-distribution, high latency, as well as cyber threats. Fog/Edge computing has been proposed for addressing some of the drawbacks, as it enables computing resources at the network's edges and it locally offers big-data analytics rather than transmitting them to the Cloud. The Fog is defined as a Cloud-like system having similar functions, including software-, platform- and infrastructure-as services. The deployment of Fog applications faces various security issues related to virtualisation, network monitoring, data protection and attack detection. This paper proposes a systemic IoT-Fog-Cloud architecture that clarifies the interactions between the three layers of IoT, Fog and Cloud for effectively implementing big-data analytics and cyber security applications. It also reviews security challenges, solutions and future research directions in the architecture.

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arXiv2018

Towards the Development of Realistic Botnet Dataset in the Internet of Things for Network Forensic Analytics: Bot-IoT Dataset

The proliferation of IoT systems, has seen them targeted by malicious third parties. To address this, realistic protection and investigation countermeasures need to be developed. Such countermeasures include network intrusion detection and network forensic systems. For that purpose, a well-structured and representative dataset is paramount for training and validating the credibility of the systems. Although there are several network, in most cases, not much information is given about the Botnet scenarios that were used. This paper, proposes a new dataset, Bot-IoT, which incorporates legitimate and simulated IoT network traffic, along with various types of attacks. We also present a realistic testbed environment for addressing the existing dataset drawbacks of capturing complete network information, accurate labeling, as well as recent and complex attack diversity. Finally, we evaluate the reliability of the BoT-IoT dataset using different statistical and machine learning methods for forensics purposes compared with the existing datasets. This work provides the baseline for allowing botnet identificaiton across IoT-specifc networks. The Bot-IoT dataset can be accessed at [1].

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arXiv2017

RCNF: Real-time Collaborative Network Forensic Scheme for Evidence Analysis

Network forensic techniques help in tracking different types of cyber attack by monitoring and inspecting network traffic. However, with the high speed and large sizes of current networks, and the sophisticated philosophy of attackers, in particular mimicking normal behaviour and/or erasing traces to avoid detection, investigating such crimes demands intelligent network forensic techniques. This paper suggests a real-time collaborative network Forensic scheme (RCNF) that can monitor and investigate cyber intrusions. The scheme includes three components of capturing and storing network data, selecting important network features using chi-square method and investigating abnormal events using a new technique called correntropy-variation. We provide a case study using the UNSW-NB15 dataset for evaluating the scheme, showing its high performance in terms of accuracy and false alarm rate compared with three recent state-of-the-art mechanisms.

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arXiv2017

Towards Developing Network forensic mechanism for Botnet Activities in the IoT based on Machine Learning Techniques

The IoT is a network of interconnected everyday objects called things that have been augmented with a small measure of computing capabilities. Lately, the IoT has been affected by a variety of different botnet activities. As botnets have been the cause of serious security risks and financial damage over the years, existing Network forensic techniques cannot identify and track current sophisticated methods of botnets. This is because commercial tools mainly depend on signature-based approaches that cannot discover new forms of botnet. In literature, several studies have conducted the use of Machine Learning ML techniques in order to train and validate a model for defining such attacks, but they still produce high false alarm rates with the challenge of investigating the tracks of botnets. This paper investigates the role of ML techniques for developing a Network forensic mechanism based on network flow identifiers that can track suspicious activities of botnets. The experimental results using the UNSW-NB15 dataset revealed that ML techniques with flow identifiers can effectively and efficiently detect botnets attacks and their tracks.

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arXiv2017

Probability Risk Identification Based Intrusion Detection System for SCADA Systems

. As Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems control several critical infrastructures, they have connected to the internet. Consequently, SCADA systems face different sophisticated types of cyber adversaries. This paper suggests a Probability Risk Identification based Intrusion Detection System (PRI-IDS) technique based on analysing network traffic of Modbus TCP/IP for identifying replay attacks. It is acknowledged that Modbus TCP is usually vulnerable due to its unauthenticated and unencrypted nature. Our technique is evaluated using a simulation environment by configuring a testbed, which is a cus- tom SCADA network that is cheap, accurate and scalable. The testbed is exploited when testing the IDS by sending individual packets from an attacker located on the same LAN as the Modbus master and slave. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed technique can effectively and efficiently recognise replay attacks.

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arXiv2017

Privacy Preservation Intrusion Detection Technique for SCADA Systems

Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems face the absence of a protection technique that can beat different types of intrusions and protect the data from disclosure while handling this data using other applications, specifically Intrusion Detection System (IDS). The SCADA system can manage the critical infrastructure of industrial control environments. Protecting sensitive information is a difficult task to achieve in reality with the connection of physical and digital systems. Hence, privacy preservation techniques have become effective in order to protect sensitive/private information and to detect malicious activities, but they are not accurate in terms of error detection, sensitivity percentage of data disclosure. In this paper, we propose a new Privacy Preservation Intrusion Detection (PPID) technique based on the correlation coefficient and Expectation Maximisation (EM) clustering mechanisms for selecting important portions of data and recognizing intrusive events. This technique is evaluated on the power system datasets for multiclass attacks to measure its reliability for detecting suspicious activities. The experimental results outperform three techniques in the above terms, showing the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed technique to be utilized for current SCADA systems.

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arXiv2017

Collaborative Anomaly Detection Framework for handling Big Data of Cloud Computing

With the ubiquitous computing of providing services and applications at anywhere and anytime, cloud computing is the best option as it offers flexible and pay-per-use based services to its customers. Nevertheless, security and privacy are the main challenges to its success due to its dynamic and distributed architecture, resulting in generating big data that should be carefully analysed for detecting network vulnerabilities. In this paper, we propose a Collaborative Anomaly Detection Framework CADF for detecting cyber attacks from cloud computing environments. We provide the technical functions and deployment of the framework to illustrate its methodology of implementation and installation. The framework is evaluated on the UNSW-NB15 dataset to check its credibility while deploying it in cloud computing environments. The experimental results showed that this framework can easily handle large-scale systems as its implementation requires only estimating statistical measures from network observations. Moreover, the evaluation performance of the framework outperforms three state-of-the-art techniques in terms of false positive rate and detection rate.

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arXiv2017

A hybrid feature selection for network intrusion detection systems: Central points

Network intrusion detection systems are an active area of research to identify threats that face computer networks. Network packets comprise of high dimensions which require huge effort to be examined effectively. As these dimensions contain some irrelevant features, they cause a high False Alarm Rate (FAR). In this paper, we propose a hybrid method as a feature selection, based on the central points of attribute values and an Association Rule Mining algorithm to decrease the FAR. This algorithm is designed to be implemented in a short processing time, due to its dependency on the central points of feature values with partitioning data records into equal parts. This algorithm is applied on the UNSW-NB15 and the NSLKDD data sets to adopt the highest ranked features. Some existing techniques are used to measure the accuracy and FAR. The experimental results show the proposed model is able to improve the accuracy and decrease the FAR. Furthermore, its processing time is extremely short.

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