Cybersecurity Commons^™

F.L.A.I.R. -- A Flow-Level Autoencoder For Intrusion Recognition, Joseph P. Dumond

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Undergraduate Honors Theses

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) networks underpin critical infrastructure worldwide, yet securing them remains an open challenge. Traditional intrusion detection systems require labeled attack data for training, a resource that is rarely available in real industrial deployments. They also fail against novel threats, a model trained on known attacks has no basis for detecting anything outside its training set. This thesis presents a Flow-Level Autoencoder for Intrusion Recognition, or FLAIR, a fully unsupervised deep learning system for network intrusion detection in IIoT environments. FLAIR is built on a Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) autoencoder trained exclusively on normal network traffic. Rather …

Gem-Can: A Real-World Dataset Of Can-Bus Attack Scenarios On An Autonomous Vehicle For Intrusion-Detection Research, Mahsa Tavasoli, Abdolhossein Sarrafzadeh, Ali Karimoddini, Tienake Phuapaiboon, Milad Khaleghi, Daniel Tobias

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

This paper presents GEM-CAN, a labelled Controller Area Network (CAN) dataset captured from an autonomous GEM e6 platform under both normal operation and controlled cyber-attack conditions.

The dataset contains ∼143 K frames comprising (i) ∼ nominal autonomous operation (∼100k messages), (ii) DoS floods using arbitration ID 0 × 00000000 (∼41 K messages), and (iii) data-tampering injections that reuse legitimate IDs for brake and steering-lock (∼1.3 K messages). Each record includes timestamp, arbitration ID (11/29-bit), DLC, eight payload bytes, and a Normal/Attack label. A companion metadata file enumerates attack windows, PCAN bus-load traces, bitrate, and test conditions. Data were collected with …

Deepsecure: A Novel Deep Learning Model For Effective Detection Of Attacks On Big Data In Internet Of Urban Things, Laiba Sabir, Nadeem Javaid, Mariam Akbar, Nabil Alrajeh, Safdar Hussain Bouk, Abdulaziz Aldegheishem

School of Cybersecurity Faculty Publications

The Internet of Urban Things (IoUTs) regularly generates large amounts of data, making it a focus of cyberthreats such as denial-of-service attacks and malware bot networks. Traditional intrusion detection systems struggle to detect intricate attack patterns, handle class imbalance, capture temporal dependencies, and exhibit transparency. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel deep machine learning model, DeepSecure, a hybrid model that combines Deep Belief Networks (DBN) for hierarchical feature extraction and Deep Neural Networks for attack classification. DBN is used for feature selection through unsupervised learning to extract hierarchical representations in the IoUTs network data. We assess the random …

Security Enhancement In Uav Swarms: A Case Study Using Federated Learning And Shap Analysis, Sushmitha Halli Sudhakara, Lida Haghnegahdar

School of Cybersecurity Faculty Publications

As cyber-physical systems (CPSs) increasingly integrate physical and digital realms, securing critical infrastructure, such as the Port of Virginia, becomes paramount. Among CPSs, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are vital for monitoring, communication, and supporting the command and control through remote reconnaissance and surveillance missions. These UAV applications often require coordination, planning, and runtime reconfiguration, traditionally managed by human decision-makers. However, this approach has limitations, as extensively documented in the literature. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has emerged as a pivotal tool to address these limitations, enhancing risk mitigation and informed decision-making. This research proposes a machine learning (ML) based security mechanism, leveraging …

Security Enhancement In Aav Swarms: A Case Study Using Federated Learning And Shap Analysis, Sushmitha Halli Sudhakara, Lida Haghnegahdar

School of Cybersecurity Faculty Publications

As cyber-physical systems (CPSs) increasingly integrate physical and digital realms, securing critical infrastructure, such as the Port of Virginia, becomes paramount. Among CPSs, Autonomous Aerial Vehicles (AAVs) are vital for monitoring, communication, and supporting the command and control through remote reconnaissance and surveillance missions. These AAV applications often require coordination, planning, and runtime reconfiguration, traditionally managed by human decision-makers. However, this approach has limitations, as extensively documented in the literature. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has emerged as a pivotal tool to address these limitations, enhancing risk mitigation and informed decision-making. This research proposes a machine learning (ML) based security mechanism, leveraging …

Setc: A Vulnerability Telemetry Collection Framework, Ryan Holeman, John Hastings, Varghese Mathew Vaidyan

Research & Publications

As emerging software vulnerabilities continuously threaten enterprises and Internet services, there is a critical need for improved security research capabilities. This paper introduces the Security Exploit Telemetry Collection (SETC) framework - an automated framework to generate reproducible vulnerability exploit data at scale for robust defensive security research. SETC deploys configurable environments to execute and record rich telemetry of vulnerability exploits within isolated containers. Exploits, vulnerable services, monitoring tools, and logging pipelines are defined via modular JSON configurations and deployed on demand. Compared to current manual processes, SETC enables automated, customizable, and repeatable vulnerability testing to produce diverse security telemetry. This …

An Enhanced Real-Time Intrusion Detection Framework Using Federated Transfer Learning In Large-Scale Iot Networks, Khawlah Harahsheh, Malek Alzaqebah, Chung-Hao Chen

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

The exponential growth of Internet of Things (IoT) devices has introduced critical security challenges, particularly in scalability, privacy, and resource constraints. Traditional centralized intrusion detection systems (IDS) struggle to address these issues effectively. To overcome these limitations, this study proposes a novel Federated Transfer Learning (FTL)-based intrusion detection framework tailored for large-scale IoT networks. By integrating Federated Learning (FL) with Transfer Learning (TL), the framework enhances detection capabilities while ensuring data privacy and reducing communication overhead. The hybrid model incorporates convolutional neural networks (CNNs), bidirectional gated recurrent units (BiGRUs), attention mechanisms, and ensemble learning. To address the class imbalance, Synthetic …