Computer Engineering Commons^™

Generative Machine Learning For Cyber Security, James Halvorsen, Dr. Assefaw Gebremedhin

Military Cyber Affairs

Automated approaches to cyber security based on machine learning will be necessary to combat the next generation of cyber-attacks. Current machine learning tools, however, are difficult to develop and deploy due to issues such as data availability and high false positive rates. Generative models can help solve data-related issues by creating high quality synthetic data for training and testing. Furthermore, some generative architectures are multipurpose, and when used for tasks such as intrusion detection, can outperform existing classifier models. This paper demonstrates how the future of cyber security stands to benefit from continued research on generative models.

Longitudinal Attacks Against Iterative Data Collection With Local Differential Privacy, Mehmet Emre Gürsoy

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

Local differential privacy (LDP) has recently emerged as an accepted standard for privacy-preserving collection of users’ data from smartphones and IoT devices. In many practical scenarios, users’ data needs to be collected repeatedly across multiple iterations. In such cases, although each collection satisfies LDP individually by itself, a longitudinal collection of multiple responses from the same user degrades that user’s privacy. To demonstrate this claim, in this paper, we propose longitudinal attacks against iterative data collection with LDP. We formulate a general Bayesian adversary model, and then individually show the application of this adversary model on six popular LDP protocols: …

Integrating Nist And Iso Cybersecurity Audit And Risk Assessment Frameworks Into Cameroonian Law, Bernard Ngalim

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

This paper reviews cybersecurity laws and regulations in Cameroon, focusing on cybersecurity and information security audits and risk assessments. The importance of cybersecurity risk assessment and the implementation of security controls to cure deficiencies noted during risk assessments or audits is a critical step in developing cybersecurity resilience. Cameroon's cybersecurity legal framework provides for audits but does not explicitly enumerate controls. Consequently, integrating relevant controls from the NIST frameworks and ISO Standards can improve the cybersecurity posture in Cameroon while waiting for a comprehensive revision of the legal framework. NIST and ISO are internationally recognized as best practices in information …

What Senior U.S. Leaders Say We Should Know About Cyber, Dr. Joseph H. Schafer

Military Cyber Affairs

On April 6, 2023, the Atlantic Council’s Cyber Statecraft Initiative hosted a panel discussion on the new National Cybersecurity Strategy. The panel featured four senior officials from the Office of the National Cyber Director (ONCD), the Department of State (DoS), the Department of Justice (DoJ), and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The author attended and asked each official to identify the most important elements that policymakers and strategists must understand about cyber. This article highlights historical and recent struggles to express cyber policy, the responses from these officials, and the author’s ongoing research to improve national security cyber policy.

Self-Learning Algorithms For Intrusion Detection And Prevention Systems (Idps), Juan E. Nunez, Roger W. Tchegui Donfack, Rohit Rohit, Hayley Horn

SMU Data Science Review

Today, there is an increased risk to data privacy and information security due to cyberattacks that compromise data reliability and accessibility. New machine learning models are needed to detect and prevent these cyberattacks. One application of these models is cybersecurity threat detection and prevention systems that can create a baseline of a network's traffic patterns to detect anomalies without needing pre-labeled data; thus, enabling the identification of abnormal network events as threats. This research explored algorithms that can help automate anomaly detection on an enterprise network using Canadian Institute for Cybersecurity data. This study demonstrates that Neural Networks with Bayesian …

An Empirical Study Of Pre-Trained Model Reuse In The Hugging Face Deep Learning Model Registry, Wenxin Jiang, Nicholas Synovic, Matt Hyatt, Taylor R. Schorlemmer, Rohan Sethi, Yung-Hsiang Lu, George K. Thiruvathukal, James C. Davis

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are being adopted as components in software systems. Creating and specializing DNNs from scratch has grown increasingly difficult as state-of-the-art architectures grow more complex. Following the path of traditional software engineering, machine learning engineers have begun to reuse large-scale pre-trained models (PTMs) and fine-tune these models for downstream tasks. Prior works have studied reuse practices for traditional software packages to guide software engineers towards better package maintenance and dependency management. We lack a similar foundation of knowledge to guide behaviors in pre-trained model ecosystems.

In this work, we present the first empirical investigation of PTM reuse. …

Robustembed: Robust Sentence Embeddings Using Self-Supervised Contrastive Pre-Training, Javad Asl, Eduardo Blanco, Daniel Takabi

School of Cybersecurity Faculty Publications

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have demonstrated their exceptional performance across a wide range of natural language processing tasks. The utilization of PLM-based sentence embeddings enables the generation of contextual representations that capture rich semantic information. However, despite their success with unseen samples, current PLM-based representations suffer from poor robustness in adversarial scenarios. In this paper, we propose RobustEmbed, a self-supervised sentence embedding framework that enhances both generalization and robustness in various text representation tasks and against diverse adversarial attacks. By generating high-risk adversarial perturbations to promote higher invariance in the embedding space and leveraging the perturbation within a novel contrastive …

Defense Of A Small Network, Isabella Adkins

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

A sample network will be virtually created consisting of three routers, one switch, and three hosts. The network will be secured using various methods such as enabling passwords and encryption. After the network has been properly secured, various attacks will be attempted with the goal of breaking into the network. These attacks include reconnaissance (gathering information), penetrating the network using the tool Metasploit, and attempting to get a credential phishing email to end users. If successful in the attacks, the network will be revisited and analyzed for any weaknesses or oversights.

Small Business Office Network, Michael Gerome

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This project will emulate a small office network environment. The project will demonstrate the process of building and configuring the network to meet the requirements laid out in the project plan. This network includes four subnets with Windows 10 end devices and a Kali Linux device, it also includes five Cisco layer 2 switches and three Cisco routers. There are also three subnets connecting the routers to each other to enable routing between the subnets. After the network environment is set up, various penetration tests are performed from the Kali Linux device to gather information. The Nmap reconnaissance tool is …

Cyber Resilience Analytics For Cyber-Physical Systems, Md Ariful Haque

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) are complex systems that evolve from the integrations of components dealing with physical processes and real-time computations, along with networking. CPSs often incorporate approaches merging from different scientific fields such as embedded systems, control systems, operational technology, information technology systems (ITS), and cybernetics. Today critical infrastructures (CIs) (e.g., energy systems, electric grids, etc.) and other CPSs (e.g., manufacturing industries, autonomous transportation systems, etc.) are experiencing challenges in dealing with cyberattacks. Major cybersecurity concerns are rising around CPSs because of their ever-growing use of information technology based automation. Often the security concerns are limited to probability-based possible attack …

Software Protection And Secure Authentication For Autonomous Vehicular Cloud Computing, Muhammad Hataba

Dissertations

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing every technology we deal with. Autonomy has been a sought-after goal in vehicles, and now more than ever we are very close to that goal. Vehicles before were dumb mechanical devices, now they are becoming smart, computerized, and connected coined as Autonomous Vehicles (AVs). Moreover, researchers found a way to make more use of these enormous capabilities and introduced Autonomous Vehicles Cloud Computing (AVCC). In these platforms, vehicles can lend their unused resources and sensory data to join AVCC.

In this dissertation, we investigate security and privacy issues in AVCC. As background, we built our …

Cyber Deception For Critical Infrastructure Resiliency, Md Ali Reza Al Amin

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Theses & Dissertations

The high connectivity of modern cyber networks and devices has brought many improvements to the functionality and efficiency of networked systems. Unfortunately, these benefits have come with many new entry points for attackers, making systems much more vulnerable to intrusions. Thus, it is critically important to protect cyber infrastructure against cyber attacks. The static nature of cyber infrastructure leads to adversaries performing reconnaissance activities and identifying potential threats. Threats related to software vulnerabilities can be mitigated upon discovering a vulnerability and-, developing and releasing a patch to remove the vulnerability. Unfortunately, the period between discovering a vulnerability and applying a …

Investigation Of Python Variable Privacy, Joshua Bartholomew

Honors Theses

This study looks at the relative security of Python regarding private variables and functions used in most other programming languages. Python has only grown in popularity due to its simple syntax and developing capabilities. However, little research has been published about how secure Python code and programs compiled from Python code actually are. This research seeks to expose vulnerabilities in Python code and determine what must be done for these vulnerabilities to be exploited by hackers to abuse potentially sensitive information contained within the program.

The proposed methodology includes examining the private variable concept in other programming languages and conducting …

Deapsecure Computational Training For Cybersecurity: Third-Year Improvements And Impacts, Bahador Dodge, Jacob Strother, Rosby Asiamah, Karina Arcaute, Wirawan Purwanto, Masha Sosonkina, Hongyi Wu

Modeling, Simulation and Visualization Student Capstone Conference

The Data-Enabled Advanced Training Program for Cybersecurity Research and Education (DeapSECURE) was introduced in 2018 as a non-degree training consisting of six modules covering a broad range of cyberinfrastructure techniques, including high performance computing, big data, machine learning and advanced cryptography, aimed at reducing the gap between current cybersecurity curricula and requirements needed for advanced research and industrial projects. By its third year, DeapSECURE, like many other educational endeavors, experienced abrupt changes brought by the COVID-19 pandemic. The training had to be retooled to adapt to fully online delivery. Hands-on activities were reformatted to accommodate self-paced learning. In this paper, …

Assessing Security Risks With The Internet Of Things, Faith Mosemann

Senior Honors Theses

For my honors thesis I have decided to study the security risks associated with the Internet of Things (IoT) and possible ways to secure them. I will focus on how corporate, and individuals use IoT devices and the security risks that come with their implementation. In my research, I found out that IoT gadgets tend to go unnoticed as a checkpoint for vulnerability. For example, often personal IoT devices tend to have the default username and password issued from the factory that a hacker could easily find through Google. IoT devices need security just as much as computers or servers …

Securing Infiniband Networks With End-Point Encryption, Noah B. Diamond

Theses and Dissertations

The NVIDIA-Mellanox Bluefield-2 is a 100 Gbps high-performance network interface which offers hardware offload and acceleration features that can operate directly on network traffic without routine involvement from the ARM CPU. This allows the ARM multi-core CPU to orchestrate the hardware to perform operations on both Ethernet and RDMA traffic at high rates rather than processing all the traffic directly. A testbed called TNAP was created for performance testing and a MiTM verification process called MiTMVMP is used to ensure proper network configuration. The hardware accelerators of the Bluefield-2 support a throughput of nearly 86 Gbps when using IPsec to …

Removing The Veil: Shining Light On The Lack Of Inclusivity In Cybersecurity Education For Students With Disabilities, Felicia Hellems, Sajal Bhatia

School of Computer Science & Engineering Faculty Publications

There are currently over one billion people living with some form of disability worldwide. The continuous increase in new technologies in today's society comes with an increased risk in security. A fundamental knowledge of cybersecurity should be a basic right available to all users of technology. A review of literature in the fields of cybersecurity, STEM, and computer science (CS) has revealed existent gaps regarding educational methods for teaching cybersecurity to students with disabilities (SWD's). To date, SWD's are largely left without equitable access to cybersecurity education. Our goal is to identify current educational methods being used to teach SWD's …

Examining Cooperative System Responses Against Grid Integrity Attacks, Alexander D. Parady

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Smart grid technologies are integral to society’s transition to sustainable energy sources, but they do not come without a cost. As the energy sector shifts away from a century’s reliance on fossil fuels and centralized generation, technology that actively monitors and controls every aspect of the power infrastructure has been widely adopted, resulting in a plethora of new vulnerabilities that have already wreaked havoc on critical infrastructure. Integrity attacks that feedback false data through industrial control systems, which result in possible catastrophic overcorrections and ensuing failures, have plagued grid infrastructure over the past several years. This threat is now at …

C2 Microservices Api: Ch4rl3sch4l3m4gn3, Thai H. Nguyễn

School of Computer Science & Engineering Undergraduate Publications

In the 21^st century, cyber-based attackers such as advance persistent threats are leveraging bots in the form of botnets to conduct a plethora of cyber-attacks. While there are several social engineering techniques used to get targets to unknowingly download these bots, it is the command-and-control techniques advance persistent threats use to control their bots that is of critical interest to the author. In this research paper, the author aims to develop a command-and-control microservice application programming interface infrastructure to facilitate botnet command-and-control attack simulations. To achieve this the author will develop a simple bot skeletal framework, utilize the latest …

Few-Shot Malware Detection Using A Novel Adversarial Reprogramming Model, Ekula Praveen Kumar

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

The increasing sophistication of malware has made detecting and defending against new strains a major challenge for cybersecurity. One promising approach to this problem is using machine learning techniques that extract representative features and train classification models to detect malware in an early stage. However, training such machine learning-based malware detection models represents a significant challenge that requires a large number of high-quality labeled data samples while it is very costly to obtain them in real-world scenarios. In other words, training machine learning models for malware detection requires the capability to learn from only a few labeled examples. To address …

Another Brick In The Wall: An Exploratory Analysis Of Digital Forensics Programs In The United States, Syria Mccullough, Stella Abudu, Ebere Onwubuariri, Ibrahim Baggili

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

We present a comprehensive review of digital forensics programs offered by universities across the United States (U.S.). While numerous studies on digital forensics standards and curriculum exist, few, if any, have examined digital forensics courses offered across the nation. Since digital forensics courses vary from university to university, online course catalogs for academic institutions were evaluated to curate a dataset. Universities were selected based on online searches, similar to those that would be made by prospective students. Ninety-seven (n = 97) degree programs in the U.S. were evaluated. Overall, results showed that advanced technical courses are missing from curricula. We …

A Framework To Detect The Susceptibility Of Employees To Social Engineering Attacks, Hashim H. Alneami

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

Social engineering attacks (SE-attacks) in enterprises are hastily growing and are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Generally, SE-attacks involve the psychological manipulation of employees into revealing confidential and valuable company data to cybercriminals. The ramifications could bring devastating financial and irreparable reputation loss to the companies. Because SE-attacks involve a human element, preventing these attacks can be tricky and challenging and has become a topic of interest for many researchers and security experts. While methods exist for detecting SE-attacks, our literature review of existing methods identified many crucial factors such as the national cultural, organizational, and personality traits of employees that enable …

Infiniband Network Monitoring: Challenges And Possibilities, Kyle D. Hintze

Theses and Dissertations

Within the realm of High Performance Computing, the InfiniBand Architecture is among the leading interconnects used today. Capable of providing high bandwidth and low latency, InfiniBand is finding applications outside the High Performance Computing domain. One of these is critical infrastructure, encompassing almost all essential sectors as the work force becomes more connected. InfiniBand is not immune to security risks, as prior research has shown that common traffic analyzing tools cannot effectively monitor InfiniBand traffic transmitted between hosts, due to the kernel bypass nature of the IBA in conjunction with Remote Direct Memory Access operations. If Remote Direct Memory Access …

Role Of Artificial Intelligence In The Internet Of Things (Iot) Cybersecurity, Murat Kuzlu, Corinne Fair, Ozgur Guler

Engineering Technology Faculty Publications

In recent years, the use of the Internet of Things (IoT) has increased exponentially, and cybersecurity concerns have increased along with it. On the cutting edge of cybersecurity is Artificial Intelligence (AI), which is used for the development of complex algorithms to protect networks and systems, including IoT systems. However, cyber-attackers have figured out how to exploit AI and have even begun to use adversarial AI in order to carry out cybersecurity attacks. This review paper compiles information from several other surveys and research papers regarding IoT, AI, and attacks with and against AI and explores the relationship between these …

Pause For A Cybersecurity Cause: Assessing The Influence Of A Waiting Period On User Habituation In Mitigation Of Phishing Attacks, Amy Antonucci

CCE Theses and Dissertations

Social engineering costs organizations billions of dollars a year. Social engineering exploits the weakest link of information security systems, the people who are using them. Phishing is a form of social engineering in which the perpetrator depends on the victim’s instinctual thinking towards an email designed to create a fear or excitement response. It is well-documented in literature that users continue to click on phishing emails costing them and their employers significant monetary resources and data loss. Training does not appear to mitigate the effects of phishing much; other solutions are necessary to mitigate phishing.

Kahneman introduced the concepts of …

An Empirical Assessment Of Users' Information Security Protection Behavior Towards Social Engineering Breaches, Nisha Jatin Patel

CCE Theses and Dissertations

User behavior is one of the most significant information security risks. Information Security is all about being aware of who and what to trust and behaving accordingly. Due to technology becoming an integral part of nearly everything in people's daily lives, the organization's need for protection from security threats has continuously increased. Social engineering is the act of tricking a user into revealing information or taking action. One of the riskiest aspects of social engineering is that it depends mainly upon user errors and is not necessarily a technology shortcoming. User behavior should be one of the first apprehensions when …

Cybersecurity Analysis Of Load Frequency Control In Power Systems: A Survey, Sahaj Saxena, Sajal Bhatia, Rahul Gupta

School of Computer Science & Engineering Faculty Publications

Today, power systems have transformed considerably and taken a new shape of geographically distributed systems from the locally centralized systems thereby leading to a new infrastructure in the framework of networked control cyber-physical system (CPS). Among the different important operations to be performed for smooth generation, transmission, and distribution of power, maintaining the scheduled frequency, against any perturbations, is an important one. The load frequency control (LFC) operation actually governs this frequency regulation activity after the primary control. Due to CPS nature, the LFC operation is vulnerable to attacks, both from physical and cyber standpoints. The cyber-attack strategies ranges from …

First Year Students' Experience In A Cyber World Course - An Evaluation, Frank Breitinger, Ryan Tully-Doyle, Kristen Przyborski, Lauren Beck, Ronald S. Harichandran

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

Although cybersecurity is a major present concern, it is not a required subject in University. In response, we developed Cyber World which introduces students to eight highly important cybersecurity topics (primarily taught by none cybersecurity experts). We embedded it into our critical thinking Common Course (core curriculum) which is a team-taught first-year experience required for all students. Cyber World was first taught in Fall 2018 to a cohort of over 150 students from various majors at the University of New Haven. This article presents the evaluation of our Fall taught course. In detail, we compare the performance of Cyber World …

Interoperable Ads-B Confidentiality, Brandon C. Burfeind

Theses and Dissertations

The worldwide air traffic infrastructure is in the late stages of transition from legacy transponder systems to Automatic Dependent Surveillance - Broadcast (ADS-B) based systems. ADS-B relies on position information from GNSS and requires aircraft to transmit their identification, state, and position. ADS-B promises the availability of high-fidelity air traffic information; however, position and identification data are not secured via authentication or encryption. This lack of security for ADS-B allows non-participants to observe and collect data on both government and private flight activity. This is a proposal for a lightweight, interoperable ADS-B confidentiality protocol which uses existing format preserving encryption …

Internet Of Things For Sustainability: Perspectives In Privacy, Cybersecurity, And Future Trends, Abdul Salam

Faculty Publications

In the sustainability IoT, the cybersecurity risks to things, sensors, and monitoring systems are distinct from the conventional networking systems in many aspects. The interaction of sustainability IoT with the physical world phenomena (e.g., weather, climate, water, and oceans) is mostly not found in the modern information technology systems. Accordingly, actuation, the ability of these devices to make changes in real world based on sensing and monitoring, requires special consideration in terms of privacy and security. Moreover, the energy efficiency, safety, power, performance requirements of these device distinguish them from conventional computers systems. In this chapter, the cybersecurity approaches towards …