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Identification of fake news : a semantic driven technique for transfer domain

- Ferdush, Jannatul, Kamruzzaman, Joarder, Karmakar, Gour, Gondal, Iqbal, Das, Raj

A framework for data privacy and security accountability in data breach communications

- Thomas, Louise, Gondal, Iqbal, Oseni, Taiwo, Firmin, Selena

  • Authors: Thomas, Louise , Gondal, Iqbal , Oseni, Taiwo , Firmin, Selena
  • Date: 2022
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: Computers and Security Vol. 116, no. (2022), p.
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  • Description: Organisations need to take steps to protect the privacy and security of the personal information they hold. However, when data is breached, how do individuals know whether the organisation took reasonable steps to protect their data? When breached organisations notify affected individuals, this communication is likely to be one of the few windows into the incident from the outside and can become an important artefact for research. This desktop study aimed to consider the extent to which publicly available Australian data breach communications reflect data privacy and security best practices. This paper presents a brief review of literature and government guidance on data security and privacy best practices, along with the results of a qualitative content analysis of 33 publicly available Australian data breach communications. This analysis illustrated that there was little reflection of data privacy and security practices. Literature, government guidance and the content analysis were used to inform and develop a new voluntary framework for organisations. This consists of a series of evaluation questions divided into two broad categories: responsible data management and responsible portrayal of the breach. The framework has the potential to help organisations plan the inclusion of data privacy and security management aspects in their data breach communications. This could assist organisations to address their legal and ethical responsibility to account for their actions in managing privacy and security of the personal data they hold. © 2022

Cyber resilience modelling for the operations of hybrid network

- Ur-Rehman, Attiq, Kamruzzuman, Joarder, Gondal, Iqbal, Jolfaei, Alireza

Fuzzy-based operational resilience modelling

- Ur-Rehman, Attiq, Kamruzzuman, Joarder, Gondal, Iqbal, Jolfaei, Alireza

Spam email categorization with nlp and using federated deep learning

- Ul Haq, Ikram, Black, Paul, Gondal, Iqbal, Kamruzzaman, Joarder, Watters, Paul, Kayes, A.

  • Authors: Ul Haq, Ikram , Black, Paul , Gondal, Iqbal , Kamruzzaman, Joarder , Watters, Paul , Kayes, A.
  • Date: 2022
  • Type: Text , Conference paper
  • Relation: 18th International Conference on Advanced Data Mining and Applications, ADMA 2022, Brisbane, Australia, 28-30 November 2022, Advanced Data Mining and Applications, 18th International Conference, ADMA 2022 Vol. 13726 LNAI, p. 15-27
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  • Description: Emails are the most popular and efficient communication method that makes them vulnerable to misuse. Federated learning (FL) provides a decentralized machine learning (ML) model, where a central server coordinates clients that collaboratively train a shared ML model. This paper proposes Federated Phishing Filtering (FPF) technique based on federated learning, natural language processing, and deep learning. FL for intelligent algorithms fuses trained models of ML algorithms from multiple sites for collective learning. This approach improves ML performance by utilizing large collective training data sets across the corporate client base, resulting in higher phishing email detection accuracy. FPF techniques preserve email privacy using local feature extraction on client email servers. Thus, the contents of emails do not need to be transmitted across the network or stored on third-party servers. We have applied FL and Natural Language Processing (NLP) for email phishing detection. This technique provides four training modes that perform FL without sharing email content. Our research categorizes emails as benign, spam, and phishing. Empirical evaluations with publicly available datasets show that accuracy is improved by the use of our Federated Deep Learning model. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Vulnerability assessment framework for a smart grid

- Rashed, Muhammad, Kamruzzaman, Joarder, Gondal, Iqbal, Islam, Syed

  • Authors: Rashed, Muhammad , Kamruzzaman, Joarder , Gondal, Iqbal , Islam, Syed
  • Date: 2022
  • Type: Text , Conference paper
  • Relation: 4th IEEE Global Power, Energy and Communication Conference, GPECOM 2022, Cappadocia, Turkey, 14-17 June 2022, Proceedings - 2022 IEEE 4th Global Power, Energy and Communication Conference, GPECOM 2022 p. 449-454
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  • Description: The increasing demand for the interconnected IoT based smart grid is facing threats from cyber-attacks due to inherent vulnerability in the smart grid network. There is a pressing need to evaluate and model these vulnerabilities in the network to avoid cascading failures in power systems. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a vulnerability assessment framework based on attack probability for the protection and security of a smart grid. Several factors were taken into consideration such as the probability of attack, propagation of attack from a parent node to child nodes, effectiveness of basic metering system, Kalman estimation and Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI). The IEEE-300 bus smart grid was simulated using MATPOWER to study the effectiveness of the proposed framework by injecting false data injection attacks (FDIA); and studying their propagation. Our results show that the use of severity assessment standards such as Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS), AMI measurements and Kalman estimates were very effective for evaluating the vulnerability assessment of smart grid in the presence of FDIA attack scenarios. © 2022 IEEE.

A smart priority-based traffic control system for emergency vehicles

- Karmakar, Gour, Chowdhury, Abdullahi, Kamruzzaman, Joarder, Gondal, Iqbal

  • Authors: Karmakar, Gour , Chowdhury, Abdullahi , Kamruzzaman, Joarder , Gondal, Iqbal
  • Date: 2021
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: IEEE Sensors Journal Vol. 21, no. 14 (2021), p. 15849-15858
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  • Description: Unwanted events on roads, such as incidents and increased traffic jams, can cause human lives and economic loss. For efficient incident management, it is essential to send Emergency Vehicles (EVs) to the incident place as quickly as possible. To reduce incidence clearance time, several approaches exist to provide a clear pathway to EVs mainly fitted with RFID sensors in the urban areas. However, they neither assign priority to the EVs based on the type and severity of an incident nor consider the effect on other on-road traffic. To address this issue, in this paper, we introduce an Emergency Vehicle Priority System (EVPS) by determining the priority level of an EV based on the type and the severity of an incident, and estimating the number of necessary signal interventions while considering the impact of those interventions on the traffic in the roads surrounding the EV's travel path. We present how EVPS determines the priority code and a new algorithm to estimate the number of green signal interventions to attain the quickest incident response while concomitantly reducing impact on others. A simulation model is developed in Simulation of Urban Mobility (SUMO) using the real traffic data of Melbourne, Australia, captured by various sensors. Results show that our system recommends appropriate number of intervention that can reduce emergency response time significantly. © 2001-2012 IEEE.

AFES: An advanced forensic evidence system

- Black, Paul, Gondal, Iqbal, Brooks, Richard, Yu, Lu

  • Authors: Black, Paul , Gondal, Iqbal , Brooks, Richard , Yu, Lu
  • Date: 2021
  • Type: Text , Conference proceedings
  • Relation: 2021 IEEE 25th International Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Workshop (EDOCW), Gold Coast, Australia, 25-29th October, 2021 p. 67-74
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  • Description: News media often contain reports that raise doubt related to policing operations. We examine the question of how to improve policing integrity during the execution of search warrants and provide an outline for law enforcement search warrants and digital forensic analysis procedures. Existing techniques for improving the integrity of search warrants are reviewed, limitations are noted, and we propose an Advanced Forensic Evidence System (AFES) to address these limitations.AFES provides an immutable record and biometric authentication of the officers present during the execution of a search warrant, time and location, video recording, seizure record, contemporaneous notes, and photographs. AFES records digital evidence items, imaging details, evidence hashes, provides an access control system, and an immutable record of access to all stored items. AFES uses a permissioned distributed ledger prototype, called Scrybe, developed under NSF aegis, to ensure evidence seizure integrity. Scrybe is run as multiple blockchain instances at law enforcement, prosecution, judicial, and defence organisations to ensure that an immutable record is maintained.

Assessing reliability of smart grid against cyberattacks using stability index

- Rashed, Muhammad, Gondal, Iqbal, Kamruzzaman, Joarder, Islam, Syed

  • Authors: Rashed, Muhammad , Gondal, Iqbal , Kamruzzaman, Joarder , Islam, Syed
  • Date: 2021
  • Type: Text , Conference paper
  • Relation: 31st Australasian Universities Power Engineering Conference, AUPEC 2021, Virtual, Online 26 to 30 September 2021, Proceedings of 2021 31st Australasian Universities Power Engineering Conference, AUPEC 2021
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  • Description: The degradation of stability index within smart grid leads to incorrect power generation and poor load balancing. The remote data dependency of the central energy management system (CEMS) causes communication delay that further leads to poor synchronization within the system. This becomes worse in the presence of cyber-attacks such as stealth or false data injection attack (FDIA). We used dynamic estimation to obtain state data after the inception of false data attack and analyzed its impact on the stability index of the smart grid. A lookup table was constructed based on the fluctuations within the voltage estimates of IEEE-Bus system. An index number was assigned to output estimates at the bus that highlights the level of severity within the grid. We used IEEE-57 Bus using MATLAB to capture and plot the results related to voltage estimates, latency, and inception time delay. The results demonstrate a clear relationship between stability index and state estimates especially when the system is under the influence of a cyber-attack. © 2021 IEEE.

Malware detection in edge devices with fuzzy oversampling and dynamic class weighting

- Khoda, Mahbub, Kamruzzaman, Joarder, Gondal, Iqbal, Imam, Tasadduq, Rahman, Ashfaqur

  • Authors: Khoda, Mahbub , Kamruzzaman, Joarder , Gondal, Iqbal , Imam, Tasadduq , Rahman, Ashfaqur
  • Date: 2021
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: Applied Soft Computing Vol. 112, no. (2021), p.
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  • Description: In Internet-of-things (IoT) domain, edge devices are used increasingly for data accumulation, preprocessing, and analytics. Intelligent integration of edge devices with Artificial Intelligence (AI) facilitates real-time analysis and decision making. However, these devices simultaneously provide additional attack opportunities for malware developers, potentially leading to information and financial loss. Machine learning approaches can detect such attacks but their performance degrades when benign samples substantially outnumber malware samples in training data. Existing approaches for such imbalanced data assume samples represented as continuous features and thus can generate invalid samples when malware applications are represented by binary features. We propose a novel malware oversampling technique that addresses this issue. Further, we propose two approaches for malware detection. Our first approach uses fuzzy set theory, while the second approach dynamically assigns higher priority to malware samples using a novel loss function. Combining our oversampling technique with these approaches, the proposed approach attains over 9% improvement over competing methods in terms of F1_score. Our approaches can, therefore, result in enhanced privacy and security in edge computing services. © 2021 Elsevier B.V.

Reanimating historic malware samples

- Black, Paul, Gondal, Iqbal, Vamplew, Peter, Lakhotia, Arun

  • Authors: Black, Paul , Gondal, Iqbal , Vamplew, Peter , Lakhotia, Arun
  • Date: 2021
  • Type: Text , Book chapter
  • Relation: Malware Analysis Using Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning p. 345-360
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  • Description: Many types of malicious software are controlled from an attacker’s command and control (C2) servers. Anti-virus organizations seek to defeat malware attacks by requesting removal of C2 server Domain Name Server (DNS) records. As a result, the life span of most malware samples is relatively short. Large datasets of historical malware samples are available for countermeasures research. However, due to the age of these malware samples, their C2 servers are no longer available. To cope with high volumes of malware production, malware analysis is increasingly performed using machine learning techniques. Dynamic analysis is commonly used for feature extraction. However, due to the absence of their C2 servers, after initialization, malware samples may exit or loop attempting to establish C2 server connections and, as a result, no longer exhibit their original capabilities. Therefore, partial execution of historical malware samples in a sandbox results in features that differ from those that would be extracted in-the-wild, thus invalidating the results of any machine learning research based on these features. One approach to extracting accurate features is to build an emulated C2 server to provide an environment that allows control of the full capabilities of the malware in an isolated environment. To illustrate the benefits of building C2 server emulators, this chapter provides examples of techniques for the creation of C2 server emulators for three malware families (Zeus, CryptoWall, and CryptoLocker) using manual reverse engineering techniques and a review of semi-automated techniques for the construction of C2 server emulators.

API based discrimination of ransomware and benign cryptographic programs

- Black, Paul, Sohail, Ammar, Gondal, Iqbal, Kamruzzaman, Joarder, Vamplew, Peter, Watters, Paul

Dynamically recommending repositories for health data : a machine learning model

- Uddin, Md Ashraf, Stranieri, Andrew, Gondal, Iqbal, Balasubramanian, Venki

  • Authors: Uddin, Md Ashraf , Stranieri, Andrew , Gondal, Iqbal , Balasubramanian, Venki
  • Date: 2020
  • Type: Text , Conference proceedings
  • Relation: 2020 Australasian Computer Science Week Multiconference, ACSW 2020
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  • Description: Recently, a wide range of digital health record repositories has emerged. These include Electronic Health record managed by the government, Electronic Medical Record (EMR) managed by healthcare providers, Personal Health Record (PHR) managed directly by the patient and new Blockchain-based systems mainly managed by technologies. Health record repositories differ from one another on the level of security, privacy, and quality of services (QoS) they provide. Health data stored in these repositories also varies from patient to patient in sensitivity, and significance depending on medical, personal preference, and other factors. Decisions regarding which digital record repository is most appropriate for the storage of each data item at every point in time are complex and nuanced. The challenges are exacerbated with health data continuously streamed from wearable sensors. In this paper, we propose a recommendation model for health data storage that can accommodate patient preferences and make storage decisions rapidly, in real-time, even with streamed data. The model maps health data to be stored in the repositories. The mapping between health data features and characteristics of each repository is learned using a machine learning-based classifier mediated through clinical rules. Evaluation results demonstrate the model's feasibility. © 2020 ACM.
  • Description: E1

Identifying cross-version function similarity using contextual features

- Black, Paul, Gondal, Iqbal, Vamplew, Peter, Lakhotia, Arun

  • Authors: Black, Paul , Gondal, Iqbal , Vamplew, Peter , Lakhotia, Arun
  • Date: 2020
  • Type: Text , Conference paper
  • Relation: 19th IEEE International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications, TrustCom 2020 p. 810-818
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  • Description: The identification of similar functions in malware assists analysis by supporting the exclusion of functions that have been previously analysed, allows the identification of new variants, supports authorship attribution, and the analysis of malware phylogeny. A function's context is a set comprising the function itself and all the program functions that may be executed when this function is called. Contextual features consist of data that is extracted from the functions contained in the function context. This paper presents a novel technique called Cross Version Contextual Function Similarity (CVCFS) to identify function pairs in two programs using features based on both individual functions and function context. The CVCFS technique uses Support Vector Machine (SVM) machine learning of function similarity features to pre-filter function pairs and then applies an edit distance technique using function semantics to reduce false positives. A case study is provided where individual and contextual features are extracted from three versions of Zeus malware. The SVM pre-filtering, followed by the use of an edit distance technique to filter false positives, gives a function pair identification accuracy of 85 percent. © 2020 IEEE.

Mobile malware detection with imbalanced data using a novel synthetic oversampling strategy and deep learning

- Khoda, Mahbub, Kamruzzaman, Joarder, Gondal, Iqbal, Imam, Tasadduq, Rahman, Ashfaqur

State estimation in the presence of cyber attacks using distributed partition technique

- Rashed, Muhammad, Gondal, Iqbal, Kamruzzuman, Joarder, Islam, Syed

  • Authors: Rashed, Muhammad , Gondal, Iqbal , Kamruzzuman, Joarder , Islam, Syed
  • Date: 2020
  • Type: Text , Conference paper
  • Relation: 2020 Australasian Universities Power Engineering Conference, AUPEC 2020, Hobart, 29 November 2020 to 2 December 2020, 2020 Australasian Universities Power Engineering Conference, AUPEC 2020 - Proceedings
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  • Description: The security of smart grid (SG) is an open problem. False data injection attacks (FDIAs) could pose serious risks to automated smart grid and can cause power system outages which eventually could lead to huge economical losses. Cyber-attacks on critical infrastructure are big concerns to the nation's energy reliability; and attackers come up with new attack strategies that couldn't be detected by the traditional bad data detection methods. Although bad data detection (BDD) schemes based on traditional state estimation and chi-square tests within power systems have been used and considered very reliable in detecting false measurements, these BDD schemes and state estimators have been found vulnerable and failed to combat engineered cyber-attacks. In this paper, a novel chi-square detector has been used with a combination of two state estimators in Distributed Partitioning State Estimation (DPSE), results show it is very effective to combat FDIAs when compared with traditional state estimation techniques. The main idea of DPSE is to increase the sensitivity of the chi-square tests by partitioning the large grids into small blocks and applying the tests on each partition individually. State estimator modelled on a novel chi-square detector which is based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm significantly improved the results. Numerical simulations conducted in MATPOWER confirm the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method. © 2020 University of Tasmania.

Vulnerability modelling for hybrid industrial control system networks

- Ur-Rehman, Attiq, Gondal, Iqbal, Kamruzzaman, Joarder, Jolfaei, Alireza

  • Authors: Ur-Rehman, Attiq , Gondal, Iqbal , Kamruzzaman, Joarder , Jolfaei, Alireza
  • Date: 2020
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: Journal of Grid Computing Vol. 18, no. 4 (2020), p. 863-878
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  • Description: With the emergence of internet-based devices, the traditional industrial control system (ICS) networks have evolved to co-exist with the conventional IT and internet enabled IoT networks, hence facing various security challenges. The IT industry around the world has widely adopted the common vulnerability scoring system (CVSS) as an industry standard to numerically evaluate the vulnerabilities in software systems. This mathematical score of vulnerabilities is combined with environmental knowledge to determine the vulnerable nodes and attack paths. IoT and ICS systems have unique dynamics and specific functionality as compared to traditional computer networks, and therefore, the legacy cyber security models would not fit these advanced networks. In this paper, we studied the CVSS v3.1 framework’s application to ICS embedded networks and an improved vulnerability framework, named CVSSIoT-ICS, is proposed. CVSSIoT-ICS and CVSS v3.1 are applied to a realistic supply chain hybrid network which consists of IT, IoT, and ICS nodes. This hybrid network is assigned with actual vulnerabilities listed in the national vulnerability database (NVD). The comparison results confirm the effectiveness of CVSSIoT-ICS framework as it is equally applicable to all nodes of a hybrid network and evaluates the vulnerabilities based on the distinct features of each node type. © 2020, Springer Nature B.V.

A Decentralized Patient Agent Controlled Blockchain for Remote Patient Monitoring

- Uddin, Ashraf, Stranieri, Andrew, Gondal, Iqbal, Balasubramanian, Venki

  • Authors: Uddin, Ashraf , Stranieri, Andrew , Gondal, Iqbal , Balasubramanian, Venki
  • Date: 2019
  • Type: Text , Conference proceedings
  • Relation: 15th International Conference on Wireless and Mobile Computing, Networking and Communications, WiMob 2019 Vol. 2019-October, p. 207-214
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  • Description: Blockchain emerging for healthcare provides a secure, decentralized and patient driven record management system. However, the storage of data generated from IoT devices in remote patient management applications requires a fast consensus mechanism. In this paper, we propose a lightweight consensus mechanism and a decentralized patient software agent to control a remote patient monitoring (RPM) system. The decentralized RPM architecture includes devices at three levels; 1) Body Area Sensor Network-medical sensors typically on or in patient's body transmitting data to a Smartphone, 2) Fog/Edge, and 3) Cloud. We propose that a Patient Agent(PA) software replicated on the Smartphone, Fog and Cloud servers processes medical data to ensure reliable, secure and private communication. Performance analysis has been conducted to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed Blockchain leveraged, distributed Patient Agent controlled remote patient monitoring system. © 2019 IEEE.
  • Description: E1

Categorical features transformation with compact one-hot encoder for fraud detection in distributed environment

- Ul Haq, Ikram, Gondal, Iqbal, Vamplew, Peter, Brown, Simon

  • Authors: Ul Haq, Ikram , Gondal, Iqbal , Vamplew, Peter , Brown, Simon
  • Date: 2019
  • Type: Text , Conference proceedings , Conference paper
  • Relation: 2019 16th Australasian Conference on Data Mining, AusDM 2018; Bathurst, NSW; 28 November 2018 through 30 November 2018 Vol. 996, p. 69-80
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  • Description: Fraud detection for online banking is an important research area, but one of the challenges is the heterogeneous nature of transactions data i.e. a combination of numeric as well as mixed attributes. Usually, numeric format data gives better performance for classification, regression and clustering algorithms. However, many machine learning problems have categorical, or nominal features, rather than numeric features only. In addition, some machine learning platforms such as Apache Spark accept numeric data only. One-hot Encoding (OHE) is a widely used approach for transforming categorical features to numerical features in traditional data mining tasks. The one-hot approach has some challenges as well: the sparseness of the transformed data and that the distinct values of an attribute are not always known in advance. Other than the model accuracy, compactness of machine learning models is equally important due to growing memory and storage needs. This paper presents an innovative technique to transform categorical features to numeric features by compacting sparse data even if all the distinct values are not known. The transformed data can be used for the development of fraud detection systems. The accuracy of the results has been validated on synthetic and real bank fraud data and a publicly available anomaly detection (KDD-99) dataset on a multi-node data cluster. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019.

Cybersecurity indexes for eHealth

- Burke, Wendy, Oseni, Taiwo, Jolfaei, Alireza, Gondal, Iqbal

  • Authors: Burke, Wendy , Oseni, Taiwo , Jolfaei, Alireza , Gondal, Iqbal
  • Date: 2019
  • Type: Text , Conference proceedings
  • Relation: 2019 Australasian Computer Science Week Multiconference, ACSW 2019; Sydney, Australia; 29th-31st January 2019 p. 1-8
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  • Description: This study aimed to explore the cybersecurity landscape to identify cybersecurity indexes that may be relevant to the health industry. While the healthcare sector poses security concerns regarding patients' records, cybersecurity in the healthcare sector has not been given much consideration. Cybersecurity indexes are a survey that measures security preparedness and capabilities of a country or organisation. An index is made up of a series of questions, often broken into categories. These categories target areas such as law, technical responses, organisational threats, capacity building and social context. Some indexes provide ranking capabilities against other countries, while others directly evaluate what it means to be cyber-ready. In this paper, cybersecurity indexes were reviewed regarding the level of assessment (country level/organisation level), and their consideration of the wider community, the health sector, and their appearance in academic literature. Results from this study found that there was no consistency between the indexes investigated, with each index having a diverse number of categories and indicators. Some indexes resulted in a score; others did not rank their results in league tables. Evidence to calculate the level of adherence was often obtained from secondary sources, with four of the country indexes using both primary and secondary sources. Eight (out of fourteen) indexes measured wider community indicators and only one index specifically measured eHealth services. Findings from the initial systematic review suggest that hardly any peer-reviewed journal articles exist on the topic of cybersecurity indexes. The paper concludes that most of the indexes studied are broad and do not consider the eHealth sector specifically. Each index relies on a different process to gauge cybersecurity, with little to no academic rigour. It is expected that this research will contribute to the current (limited) literature addressing cybersecurity indexes.
  • Description: ACM International Conference Proceeding Series