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Yan Lin Aung

Publications and source records attributed to Yan Lin Aung.

8 recordsLinked to original sources

CyBOKClaw: Human-in-the-Loop CyBOK Mapping for Cybersecurity Curriculum

This paper presents CyBOKClaw, an interpretable human-in-the-loop retrieval framework for mapping cybersecurity keywords or phrases (KWoPs) to the Cyber Security Body of Knowledge (CyBOK). Rather than treating the task as strict exact classification, the framework is designed as a top-k candidate generator for expert review. It combines query normalization, curated term expansion, concept-level boosts, topic-description enrichment, and domain-sensitive ranking rules. Because educational KWoPs are often broad, ambiguous, and only approximately aligned with CyBOK terminology, strict exact matching provides only a partial account of practical utility. We therefore evaluate the framework using both structural retrieval metrics and an expert-guided top-5 usefulness metric, ECA-5 (Exact or Closest Acceptable Match at top-5), which records whether the returned candidates contain at least one mapping that an expert would judge exact or accept as the nearest practical CyBOK placement. On the development dataset, CyBOKClaw achieves 64.73% EXA-5 (Exact Match at top-5), 84.18% structural semantic alignment, and 91.88% ECA-5; on the validation dataset, it achieves 81.19% EXA-5, 93.32% structural semantic alignment, and 98.00% ECA-5. These results show that expert-guided top-k usefulness provides a more faithful account of practical CyBOK mapping utility than exact structural matching alone, and that CyBOKClaw is effective as a CyBOK-specific expert-support retrieval system.

cs.CR

BYOT-CPS: A Hybrid Cyber-Physical Systems Testbed for IoT Security Assessment and Platform Evaluation

Internet of Things (IoT) security research continues to face a methodological gap between scalable virtual experimentation and realistic device behaviour. While pure simulation and emulation platforms provide control, repeatability, and scale, they do not fully reproduce firmware-specific behaviours, hardware characteristics, and vendor implementation weaknesses that frequently determine real-world exploitability. Conversely, physicalonly testbeds provide realism but are costly to assemble, difficult to reconfigure, and hard to replicate across institutions. This paper presents Build Your Own Cyber-Physical Systems Testbed (BYOT-CPS), a hybrid cyber-physical testbed that connects real IoT devices to virtualised network infrastructure built on GNS3. BYOT-CPS is designed to support security experimentation, education, and independent evaluation of commercial IoT security platforms within a controlled environment that preserves authentic device behaviour. Six requirements for such a testbed are defined: fidelity, heterogeneity, scalability, reproducibility, extensibility, and independence. A prototype deployment integrating smart bulbs, smart plugs, switches, and IP cameras with virtual enterprise, server, attack, and monitoring zones is used to demonstrate hybrid connectivity, penetration testing workflows, a Mirai-style denial-of-service attack, traffic monitoring, and controlled device manipulation. The evidence presented constitutes a feasibility validation of the framework rather than a largescale comparative benchmark. Within that scope, BYOT-CPS offers a practical middle ground between emulation-only research environments and costly physical laboratories while positioning vendor-neutral platform evaluation as a forward-looking design objective.

cs.CR

A Cyber-Twin Based Honeypot for Gathering Threat Intelligence

Critical Infrastructure (CI) is prone to cyberattacks. Several techniques have been developed to protect CI against such attacks. In this work, we describe a honeypot based on a cyber twin for a water treatment plant. The honeypot is intended to serve as a realistic replica of a water treatment plant that attracts potential attackers. The attacks launched on the honeypot are recorded and analyzed for threat intelligence. The intelligence so obtained is shared with the management of water treatment plants, who in turn may use it to improve plant protection systems. The honeypot used here is operational and has been attacked on several occasions using, for example, a ransomware attack that is described in detail.

cs.CR

HoneyWin: High-Interaction Windows Honeypot in Enterprise Environment

Windows operating systems (OS) are ubiquitous in enterprise Information Technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) environments. Due to their widespread adoption and known vulnerabilities, they are often the primary targets of malware and ransomware attacks. With 93% of the ransomware targeting Windows-based systems, there is an urgent need for advanced defensive mechanisms to detect, analyze, and mitigate threats effectively. In this paper, we propose HoneyWin a high-interaction Windows honeypot that mimics an enterprise IT environment. The HoneyWin consists of three Windows 11 endpoints and an enterprise-grade gateway provisioned with comprehensive network traffic capturing, host-based logging, deceptive tokens, endpoint security and real-time alerts capabilities. The HoneyWin has been deployed live in the wild for 34 days and receives more than 5.79 million unsolicited connections, 1.24 million login attempts, 5 and 354 successful logins via remote desktop protocol (RDP) and secure shell (SSH) respectively. The adversary interacted with the deceptive token in one of the RDP sessions and exploited the public-facing endpoint to initiate the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) brute-force bot attack via SSH sessions. The adversary successfully harvested 1,250 SMTP credentials after attempting 151,179 credentials during the attack.

cs.CR

ChatIoT: Large Language Model-based Security Assistant for Internet of Things with Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Internet of Things (IoT) has gained widespread popularity, revolutionizing industries and daily life. However, it has also emerged as a prime target for attacks. Numerous efforts have been made to improve IoT security, and substantial IoT security and threat information, such as datasets and reports, have been developed. However, existing research often falls short in leveraging these insights to assist or guide users in harnessing IoT security practices in a clear and actionable way. In this paper, we propose ChatIoT, a large language model (LLM)-based IoT security assistant designed to disseminate IoT security and threat intelligence. By leveraging the versatile property of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), ChatIoT successfully integrates the advanced language understanding and reasoning capabilities of LLM with fast-evolving IoT security information. Moreover, we develop an end-to-end data processing toolkit to handle heterogeneous datasets. This toolkit converts datasets of various formats into retrievable documents and optimizes chunking strategies for efficient retrieval. Additionally, we define a set of common use case specifications to guide the LLM in generating answers aligned with users' specific needs and expertise levels. Finally, we implement a prototype of ChatIoT and conduct extensive experiments with different LLMs, such as LLaMA3, LLaMA3.1, and GPT-4o. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that ChatIoT can generate more reliable, relevant, and technical in-depth answers for most use cases. When evaluating the answers with LLaMA3:70B, ChatIoT improves the above metrics by over 10% on average, particularly in relevance and technicality, compared to using LLMs alone.

cs.CR

Generative AI for Internet of Things Security: Challenges and Opportunities

As Generative AI (GenAI) continues to gain prominence and utility across various sectors, their integration into the realm of Internet of Things (IoT) security evolves rapidly. This work delves into an examination of the state-of-the-art literature and practical applications on how GenAI could improve and be applied in the security landscape of IoT. Our investigation aims to map the current state of GenAI implementation within IoT security, exploring their potential to fortify security measures further. Through the compilation, synthesis, and analysis of the latest advancements in GenAI technologies applied to IoT, this paper not only introduces fresh insights into the field, but also lays the groundwork for future research directions. It explains the prevailing challenges within IoT security, discusses the effectiveness of GenAI in addressing these issues, and identifies significant research gaps through MITRE Mitigations. Accompanied with three case studies, we provide a comprehensive overview of the progress and future prospects of GenAI applications in IoT security. This study serves as a foundational resource to improve IoT security through the innovative application of GenAI, thus contributing to the broader discourse on IoT security and technology integration.

cs.CR

HADES-IoT: A Practical Host-Based Anomaly Detection System for IoT Devices (Extended Version)

Internet of Things (IoT) devices have become ubiquitous and are spread across many application domains including the industry, transportation, healthcare, and households. However, the proliferation of the IoT devices has raised the concerns about their security, especially when observing that many manufacturers focus only on the core functionality of their products due to short time to market and low-cost pressures, while neglecting security aspects. Moreover, it does not exist any established or standardized method for measuring and ensuring the security of IoT devices. Consequently, vulnerabilities are left untreated, allowing attackers to exploit IoT devices for various purposes, such as compromising privacy, recruiting devices into a botnet, or misusing devices to perform cryptocurrency mining. In this paper, we present a practical Host-based Anomaly DEtection System for IoT (HADES-IoT) that represents the last line of defense. HADES-IoT has proactive detection capabilities, provides tamper-proof resistance, and it can be deployed on a wide range of Linux-based IoT devices. The main advantage of HADES-IoT is its low performance overhead, which makes it suitable for the IoT domain, where state-of-the-art approaches cannot be applied due to their high-performance demands. We deployed HADES-IoT on seven IoT devices to evaluate its effectiveness and performance overhead. Our experiments show that HADES-IoT achieved 100% effectiveness in the detection of current IoT malware such as VPNFilter and IoTReaper; while on average, requiring only 5.5% of available memory and causing only a low CPU load.

cs.CR

Three-Dimensional Grain Boundary Spectroscopy in Transparent High Power Ceramic Laser Materials

Using confocal Raman and fluorescence spectroscopic imaging in 3-dimensions, we show direct evidence for Nd3+-Nd3+ interactions across grain boundaries (GBs) in Nd3+:YAG laser ceramics. It is clearly shown that Nd3+ segregation takes place at GBs leading to self-fluorescence quenching which affects a volume fraction as high as 20%. In addition, we show a clear trend of increasing spatial inhomogeneities in Nd3+ concentration when the doping levels exceeds 3 at%, which is not detected by standard spectrometry techniques. These results could point the way to further improvements in what is already an impressive class of ceramic laser materials.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci