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Shuva Paul

Publications and source records attributed to Shuva Paul.

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Network and Device Level Cyber Deception for Contested Environments Using RL and LLMs

Cyber deception assists in increasing the attacker's budget in reconnaissance or any early phases of threat intrusions. In the past, numerous methods of cyber deception have been adopted, such as IP address randomization, the creation of honeypots and honeynets mimicking an actual set of services, and networks deployed within an enterprise or operational technology(OT) network. These types of strategies follow naive approaches of recreating services that are expensive and that need a lot of human intervention. The advent of cloud services and other automations of containerized applications, such as Kubernetes, makes cyber defense easier. Yet, there remains a lot of potential to improve the accuracy of these deception strategies and to make them cost-effective using artificial intelligence (AI)-based solutions by making the deception more dynamic. Hence, in this work, we review various AI-based solutions in building network- and device-level cyber deception methods in contested environments. Specifically, we focus on leveraging the fusion of large language models (LLMs) and reinforcement learning(RL) in optimally learning these cyber deception strategies and validating the efficacy of such strategies in some stealthy attacks against OT systems in the literature.

cs.CR

LLM-Assisted Proactive Threat Intelligence for Automated Reasoning

Successful defense against dynamically evolving cyber threats requires advanced and sophisticated techniques. This research presents a novel approach to enhance real-time cybersecurity threat detection and response by integrating large language models (LLMs) and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems with continuous threat intelligence feeds. Leveraging recent advancements in LLMs, specifically GPT-4o, and the innovative application of RAG techniques, our approach addresses the limitations of traditional static threat analysis by incorporating dynamic, real-time data sources. We leveraged RAG to get the latest information in real-time for threat intelligence, which is not possible in the existing GPT-4o model. We employ the Patrowl framework to automate the retrieval of diverse cybersecurity threat intelligence feeds, including Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE), Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE), Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS), and Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) databases, and integrate these with the all-mpnet-base-v2 model for high-dimensional vector embeddings, stored and queried in Milvus. We demonstrate our system's efficacy through a series of case studies, revealing significant improvements in addressing recently disclosed vulnerabilities, KEVs, and high-EPSS-score CVEs compared to the baseline GPT-4o. This work not only advances the role of LLMs in cybersecurity but also establishes a robust foundation for the development of automated intelligent cyberthreat information management systems, addressing crucial gaps in current cybersecurity practices.

cs.CR

Resilience assessment and planning in power distribution systems:Past and future considerations

Over the past decade, extreme weather events have significantly increased worldwide, leading to widespread power outages and blackouts. As these threats continue to challenge power distribution systems, the importance of mitigating the impacts of extreme weather events has become paramount. Consequently, resilience has become crucial for designing and operating power distribution systems. This work comprehensively explores the current landscape of resilience evaluation and metrics within the power distribution system domain, reviewing existing methods and identifying key attributes that define effective resilience metrics. The challenges encountered during the formulation, development, and calculation of these metrics are also addressed. Additionally, this review acknowledges the intricate interdependencies between power distribution systems and critical infrastructures, including information and communication technology, transportation, water distribution, and natural gas networks. It is important to understand these interdependencies and their impact on power distribution system resilience. Moreover, this work provides an in-depth analysis of existing research on planning solutions to enhance distribution system resilience and support power distribution system operators and planners in developing effective mitigation strategies. These strategies are crucial for minimizing the adverse impacts of extreme weather events and fostering overall resilience within power distribution systems.

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