Information Security Commons^™

Content Moderation On Social Media: Social And Computational Standards And Implications, Mohit Singhal

Computer Science and Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Social media has become a powerful tool that reflects human communication's best and worst aspects. They allow individuals to freely express opinions, communicate with others, and learn about new stories. On the other hand, they have become fertile grounds for several forms of abuse, harassment, and the dissemination of misinformation. Social media platforms have established and employed content moderation to counteract the spread of abuse and misinformation.

Some critical challenges hinder the understanding of the social media content moderation ecosystem. This dissertation investigates various aspects of content moderation, including their coverage, fairness, and effectiveness. Firstly, it investigates how, in practice, …

Data Science In Finance: Challenges And Opportunities, Xianrong Zheng, Elizabeth Gildea, Sheng Chai, Tongxiao Zhang, Shuxi Wang

Information Technology & Decision Sciences Faculty Publications

Data science has become increasingly popular due to emerging technologies, including generative AI, big data, deep learning, etc. It can provide insights from data that are hard to determine from a human perspective. Data science in finance helps to provide more personal and safer experiences for customers and develop cutting-edge solutions for a company. This paper surveys the challenges and opportunities in applying data science to finance. It provides a state-of-the-art review of financial technologies, algorithmic trading, and fraud detection. Also, the paper identifies two research topics. One is how to use generative AI in algorithmic trading. The other is …

Cyclegan-Gradient Penalty For Enhancing Android Adversarial Malware Detection In Gray Box Setting, Fabrice Setephin Atedjio, Jean-Pierre Lienou, Frederica F. Nelson, Sachin S. Shetty, Charles A. Kamhoua

VMASC Publications

Adversarial attacks pose significant threats to Android malware detection by undermining the effectiveness of machine learning-based systems. The rapid increase in Android apps complicates the management of malicious software that can compromise user defense solutions. Many current Android defense techniques rely on deep learning methods. Malicious users exploit GAN-based attacks to achieve adversarial attack transferability and deceive target models by crafting adversarial examples based on known models. We propose a new model based on a Cycle Generative Adversarial Network (CycleGAN) to detect GAN-based attacks. This model incorporates a gradient penalty to enhance the detection rate of the target model. Our …

Applications Of Ai/Ml In Maritime Cyber Supply Chains, Rafael Diaz, Ricardo Ungo, Katie Smith, Lida Haghnegahdar, Bikash Singh, Tran Phuong

School of Cybersecurity Faculty Publications

Digital transformation is a new trend that describes enterprise efforts in transitioning manual and likely outdated processes and activities to digital formats dominated by the extensive use of Industry 4.0 elements, including the pervasive use of cyber-physical systems to increase efficiency, reduce waste, and increase responsiveness. A new domain that intersects supply chain management and cybersecurity emerges as many processes as possible of the enterprise require the convergence and synchronizing of resources and information flows in data-driven environments to support planning and execution activities. Protecting the information becomes imperative as big data flows must be parsed and translated into actions …

Age Of Sensing Empowered Holographic Isac Framework For Nextg Wireless Networks: A Vae And Drl Approach, Apurba Adhikary, Avi Deb Raha, Yu Qiao, Md. Shirajum Munir, Monishanker Halder, Choong Seon Hong

School of Cybersecurity Faculty Publications

This paper proposes an artificial intelligence (AI) framework that leverages integrated sensing and communication (ISAC), aided by the age of sensing (AoS) to ensure the timely location updates of the users for a holographic MIMO (HMIMO)- enabled wireless network. The AI-driven framework guarantees optimal power allocation for efficient beamforming by activating the minimal number of grids from the HMIMO base station. An optimization problem is formulated to maximize the sensing utility function, aiming to maximize the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) of the received signal, beam-pattern gains to improve the sensing SINR of reflected echo signals and maximizing the evidence lower bound …

Heuristic Machine Learning Approaches For Identifying Phishing Threats Across Web And Email Platforms, Ramprasath Jayaprakash, Krishnaraj Natarajan, J. Alfred Daniel, Chandru Vignesh Chinnappan, Jayant Giri, Hong Qin, Saurav Mallik

Data Science Faculty Publications

Life has become more comfortable in the era of advanced technology in this cutthroat competitive world. However, there are also emerging harmful technologies that pose a threat. Without a doubt, phishing is one of the rising concerns that leads to stealing vital information such as passwords, security codes, and personal data from any target node through communication hijacking techniques. In addition, phishing attacks include delivering false messages that originate from a trusted source. Moreover, a phishing attack aims to get the victim to run malicious programs and reveal confidential data, such as bank credentials, one-time passwords, and user login credentials. …

Robustsentembed: Robust Sentence Embeddings Using Adversarial Self-Supervised Contrastive Learning, Javad Rafiei Asl, Prajwal Panzade, Eduardo Blanco, Daniel Takabi, Zhipeng Cai

School of Cybersecurity Faculty Publications

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have consistently demonstrated outstanding performance across a diverse spectrum of natural language processing tasks. Nevertheless, despite their success with unseen data, current PLM-based representations often exhibit poor robustness in adversarial settings. In this paper, we introduce RobustSentEmbed, a self-supervised sentence embedding framework designed to improve both generalization and robustness in diverse text representation tasks and against a diverse set of adversarial attacks. Through the generation of high-risk adversarial perturbations and their utilization in a novel objective function, RobustSentEmbed adeptly learns high-quality and robust sentence embeddings. Our experiments confirm the superiority of RobustSentEmbed over state-of-the-art representations. Specifically, …

A Systemic Mapping Study On Intrusion Response Systems, Adel Rezapour, Mohammad Ghasemigol, Daniel Takabi

School of Cybersecurity Faculty Publications

With the increasing frequency and sophistication of network attacks, network administrators are facing tremendous challenges in making fast and optimum decisions during critical situations. The ability to effectively respond to intrusions requires solving a multi-objective decision-making problem. While several research studies have been conducted to address this issue, the development of a reliable and automated Intrusion Response System (IRS) remains unattainable. This paper provides a Systematic Mapping Study (SMS) for IRS, aiming to investigate the existing studies, their limitations, and future directions in this field. A novel semi-automated research methodology is developed to identify and summarize related works. The innovative …

Federated Learning: Overview, Strategies, Applications, Tools And Future Directions, Betul Yurdem, Murat Kuzlu, Mehmet Kemal Gullu, Maliha Tabassum

Engineering Technology Faculty Publications

Federated learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning process, which allows multiple nodes to work together to train a shared model without exchanging raw data. It offers several key advantages, such as data privacy, security, efficiency, and scalability, by keeping data local and only exchanging model updates through the communication network. This review paper provides a comprehensive overview of federated learning, including its principles, strategies, applications, and tools along with opportunities, challenges, and future research directions. The findings of this paper emphasize that federated learning strategies can significantly help overcome privacy and confidentiality concerns, particularly for high-risk applications.

Sub-Band Backdoor Attack In Remote Sensing Imagery, Kazi Aminul Islam, Hongyi Wu, Chunsheng Xin, Rui Ning, Liuwan Zhu, Jiang Li

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Remote sensing datasets usually have a wide range of spatial and spectral resolutions. They provide unique advantages in surveillance systems, and many government organizations use remote sensing multispectral imagery to monitor security-critical infrastructures or targets. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has advanced rapidly in recent years and has been widely applied to remote image analysis, achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. However, AI models are vulnerable and can be easily deceived or poisoned. A malicious user may poison an AI model by creating a stealthy backdoor. A backdoored AI model performs well on clean data but behaves abnormally when a planted trigger appears in …

Ensemble Learning With Sleep Mode Management To Enhance Anomaly Detection In Iot Environment, Khawlah Harahsheh, Rami Al-Naimat, Malek Alzaqebah, Salam Shreem, Esraa Aldreabi, Chung-Hao Chen

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

The rapid proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices has underscored the critical need for energy-efficient cybersecurity measures. This presents the dual challenge of maintaining robust security while minimizing power consumption. Thus, this paper proposes enhancing the machine learning performance through Ensemble Techniques with Sleep Mode Management (ELSM) approach for IoT Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS). The main challenge lies in the high-power consumption attributed to continuous monitoring in traditional IDS setups. ELSM addresses this challenge by introducing a sophisticated sleep-awake mechanism, activating the IDS system only during anomaly detection events, effectively minimizing energy expenditure during periods of normal network operation. …

Mosaic: A Prune-And-Assemble Approach For Efficient Model Pruning In Privacy-Preserving Deep Learning, Yifei Cai, Qiao Zhang, Rui Ning, Chunsheng Xin, Hongyi Wu

Computer Science Faculty Publications

To enable common users to capitalize on the power of deep learning, Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS) has been proposed in the literature, which opens powerful deep learning models of service providers to the public. To protect the data privacy of end users, as well as the model privacy of the server, several state-of-the-art privacy-preserving MLaaS frameworks have also been proposed. Nevertheless, despite the exquisite design of these frameworks to enhance computation efficiency, the computational cost remains expensive for practical applications. To improve the computation efficiency of deep learning (DL) models, model pruning has been adopted as a strategic …

Reducing Food Scarcity: The Benefits Of Urban Farming, S.A. Claudell, Emilio Mejia

Journal of Nonprofit Innovation

Urban farming can enhance the lives of communities and help reduce food scarcity. This paper presents a conceptual prototype of an efficient urban farming community that can be scaled for a single apartment building or an entire community across all global geoeconomics regions, including densely populated cities and rural, developing towns and communities. When deployed in coordination with smart crop choices, local farm support, and efficient transportation then the result isn’t just sustainability, but also increasing fresh produce accessibility, optimizing nutritional value, eliminating the use of ‘forever chemicals’, reducing transportation costs, and fostering global environmental benefits.

Imagine Doris, who is …

The Transformative Integration Of Artificial Intelligence With Cmmc And Nist 800-171 For Advanced Risk Management And Compliance, Mia Lunati

Cybersecurity Undergraduate Research Showcase

This paper explores the transformative potential of integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) with established cybersecurity frameworks such as the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Special Publication 800-171. The thesis argues that the relationship between AI and these frameworks has the capacity to transform risk management in cybersecurity, where it could serve as a critical element in threat mitigation. In addition to addressing AI’s capabilities, this paper acknowledges the risks and limitations of these systems, highlighting the need for extensive research and monitoring when relying on AI. One must understand boundaries when integrating …

Designing An Artificial Immune Inspired Intrusion Detection System, William Hosier Anderson

Theses and Dissertations

The domain of Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) has witnessed growing interest in recent years due to the escalating threats posed by cyberattacks. As Internet of Things (IoT) becomes increasingly integrated into our every day lives, we widen our attack surface and expose more of our personal lives to risk. In the same way the Human Immune System (HIS) safeguards our physical self, a similar solution is needed to safeguard our digital self. This thesis presents the Artificial Immune inspired Intrusion Detection System (AIS-IDS), an IDS modeled after the HIS. This thesis proposes an architecture for AIS-IDS, instantiates an AIS-IDS model …

Rising Threat - Deepfakes And National Security In The Age Of Digital Deception, Dougo Kone-Sow

Cybersecurity Undergraduate Research Showcase

This paper delves into the intricate landscape of deepfakes, exploring their genesis, capabilities, and far-reaching implications. The rise of deepfake technology presents an unprecedented threat to American national security, propagating disinformation and manipulation across various media formats. Notably, deepfakes have evolved from a historical backdrop of disinformation campaigns, merging with the advancements of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to craft convincing but false multimedia content.

Examining the capabilities of deepfakes reveals their potential for misuse, evidenced by instances targeting individuals, companies, and even influencing political events like the 2020 U.S. elections. The paper highlights the direct threats posed by …

New Paths Of Attacks: Revealing The Adaptive Integration Of Artificial Intelligence In Evolving Cyber Threats Targeting Social Media Users And Their Data, Larry Teasley

Cybersecurity Undergraduate Research Showcase

The intersection between artificial intelligence tools and social media has opened doors to numerous opportunities and risks. This research delves into the escalating threat landscape in a society heavily dependent on social media. Despite the efforts by social media companies and cybersecurity professionals to mitigate cyber-attacks, the constant advancements of new technologies render social media platforms increasingly vulnerable. Malicious actors exploit generative AI to collect user data, enhancing cyber threats on social media. Notably, generative AI amplifies phishing attacks, disseminates false information, and propagates propaganda, posing substantial challenges to platform security. Ease access to large language models (LLMs) further complicates …

Learning Program Semantics For Vulnerability Detection Via Vulnerability-Specific Inter-Procedural Slicing, Bozhi Wu, Shangqing Liu, Xiao Yang, Zhiming Li, Jun Sun, Shang-Wei Lin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Learning-based approaches that learn code representations for software vulnerability detection have been proven to produce inspiring results. However, they still fail to capture complete and precise vulnerability semantics for code representations. To address the limitations, in this work, we propose a learning-based approach namely SnapVuln, which first utilizes multiple vulnerability-specific inter-procedural slicing algorithms to capture vulnerability semantics of various types and then employs a Gated Graph Neural Network (GGNN) with an attention mechanism to learn vulnerability semantics. We compare SnapVuln with state-of-the-art learning-based approaches on two public datasets, and confirm that SnapVuln outperforms them. We further perform an ablation study …

Integrity, Confidentiality, And Equity: Using Inquiry-Based Labs To Help Students Understand Ai And Cybersecurity, Richard C. Alexander, Liran Ma, Ze-Li Dou, Zhipeng Cai, Yan Huang

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have brought society closer to the long-held dream of creating machines to help with both common and complex tasks and functions. From recommending movies to detecting disease in its earliest stages, AI has become an aspect of daily life many people accept without scrutiny. Despite its functionality and promise, AI has inherent security risks that users should understand and programmers must be trained to address. The ICE (integrity, confidentiality, and equity) cybersecurity labs developed by a team of cybersecurity researchers addresses these vulnerabilities to AI models through a series of hands-on, inquiry-based labs. Through …

A Smart Chatbot System For Digitizing Service Management To Improve Business Continuity, Asraa Mohammed Albeshr

Theses

Chatbots, also called digital systems that require a natural language-based interface for user interaction, are increasingly being integrated into our daily lives. These chatbots respond intelligently to voice and text and function as sophisticated entities. Its functioning includes the recognition of multiple human languages through the application of Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. These chatbots find applications in various areas such as e-commerce services, medical assistance, recommendation systems, and educational purposes. This reflects the versatility and widespread adoption of this technology. AI chatbots play a crucial role in improving IT support in IT Service Management (ITSM) for better business continuity. …

Executive Order On The Safe, Secure, And Trustworthy Development And Use Of Artificial Intelligence, Joseph R. Biden

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

Section 1. Purpose. Artificial intelligence (AI) holds extraordinary potential for both promise and peril. Responsible AI use has the potential to help solve urgent challenges while making our world more prosperous, productive, innovative, and secure. At the same time, irresponsible use could exacerbate societal harms such as fraud, discrimination, bias, and disinformation; displace and disempower workers; stifle competition; and pose risks to national security. Harnessing AI for good and realizing its myriad benefits requires mitigating its substantial risks. This endeavor demands a society-wide effort that includes government, the private sector, academia, and civil society.

My Administration places the highest urgency …

Integrating Human Expert Knowledge With Openai And Chatgpt: A Secure And Privacy-Enabled Knowledge Acquisition Approach, Ben Phillips

College of Engineering Summer Undergraduate Research Program

Advanced Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle to produce accurate results and preserve user privacy for use cases involving domain-specific knowledge. A privacy-preserving approach for leveraging LLM capabilities on domain-specific knowledge could greatly expand the use cases of LLMs in a variety of disciplines and industries. This project explores a method for acquiring domain-specific knowledge for use with GPT3 while protecting sensitive user information with ML-based text-sanitization.

Learning Representations For Effective And Explainable Software Bug Detection And Fixing, Yi Li

Dissertations

Software has an integral role in modern life; hence software bugs, which undermine software quality and reliability, have substantial societal and economic implications. The advent of machine learning and deep learning in software engineering has led to major advances in bug detection and fixing approaches, yet they fall short of desired precision and recall. This shortfall arises from the absence of a 'bridge,' known as learning code representations, that can transform information from source code into a suitable representation for effective processing via machine and deep learning.

This dissertation builds such a bridge. Specifically, it presents solutions for effectively learning …

Fortifying Robustness: Unveiling The Intricacies Of Training And Inference Vulnerabilities In Centralized And Federated Neural Networks, Guanxiong Liu

Dissertations

Neural network (NN) classifiers have gained significant traction in diverse domains such as natural language processing, computer vision, and cybersecurity, owing to their remarkable ability to approximate complex latent distributions from data. Nevertheless, the conventional assumption of an attack-free operating environment has been challenged by the emergence of adversarial examples. These perturbed samples, which are typically imperceptible to human observers, can lead to misclassifications by the NN classifiers. Moreover, recent studies have uncovered the ability of poisoned training data to generate Trojan backdoored classifiers that exhibit misclassification behavior triggered by predefined patterns.

In recent years, significant research efforts have been …

Decompiling X86 Deep Neural Network Executables, Zhibo Liu, Yuanyuan Yuan, Shuai Wang, Xiaofei Xie, Lei Ma

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Due to their widespread use on heterogeneous hardware devices, deep learning (DL) models are compiled into executables by DL compilers to fully leverage low-level hardware primitives. This approach allows DL computations to be undertaken at low cost across a variety of computing platforms, including CPUs, GPUs, and various hardware accelerators. We present BTD (Bin to DNN), a decompiler for deep neural network (DNN) executables. BTD takes DNN executables and outputs full model specifications, including types of DNN operators, network topology, dimensions, and parameters that are (nearly) identical to those of the input models. BTD delivers a practical framework to process …

Multi-Granularity Detector For Vulnerability Fixes, Truong Giang Nguyen, Cong, Thanh Le, Hong Jin Kang, Ratnadira Widyasari, Chengran Yang, Zhipeng Zhao, Bowen Xu, Jiayuan Zhou, Xin Xia, Ahmed E. Hassan, David Lo, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the increasing reliance on Open Source Software, users are exposed to third-party library vulnerabilities. Software Composition Analysis (SCA) tools have been created to alert users of such vulnerabilities. SCA requires the identification of vulnerability-fixing commits. Prior works have proposed methods that can automatically identify such vulnerability-fixing commits. However, identifying such commits is highly challenging, as only a very small minority of commits are vulnerability fixing. Moreover, code changes can be noisy and difficult to analyze. We observe that noise can occur at different levels of detail, making it challenging to detect vulnerability fixes accurately. To address these challenges and …

Case Study: The Impact Of Emerging Technologies On Cybersecurity Education And Workforces, Austin Cusak

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

A qualitative case study focused on understanding what steps are needed to prepare the cybersecurity workforces of 2026-2028 to work with and against emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Conducted through a workshop held in two parts at a cybersecurity education conference, findings came both from a semi-structured interview with a panel of experts as well as small workgroups of professionals answering seven scenario-based questions. Data was thematically analyzed, with major findings emerging about the need to refocus cybersecurity STEM at the middle school level with problem-based learning, the disconnects between workforce operations and cybersecurity operators, the …

Lidar Segmentation-Based Adversarial Attacks On Autonomous Vehicles, Blake Johnson

Scholarly Horizons: University of Minnesota, Morris Undergraduate Journal

Autonomous vehicles utilizing LiDAR-based 3D perception systems are susceptible to adversarial attacks. This paper focuses on a specific attack scenario that relies on the creation of adversarial point clusters with the intention of fooling the segmentation model utilized by LiDAR into misclassifying point cloud data. This can be translated into the real world with the placement of objects (such as road signs or cardboard) at these adversarial point cluster locations. These locations are generated through an optimization algorithm performed on said adversarial point clusters that are introduced by the attacker.

Structural Anomaly Detection, Shoufu Luo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

As computer systems become more complex and powerful, the threat of sophisticated and persistent computer attacks increases dramatically. Traditional intrusion detection systems that rely on log analysis struggle to keep pace with these evolving threats, as the attacking trails are often buried in high-volume and high-velocity legitimate activities in the system. Despite tremendous progress in applying machine learning techniques to anomaly-based intrusion detection, such methods continue to suffer from a high false positive rate due to the diversity and variability of individual behavior.To address this problem, this thesis proposes a new framework for detecting structural anomalies in computer systems. The …

What Effects Do Large Language Models Have On Cybersecurity, Josiah Marshall

Cybersecurity Undergraduate Research Showcase

Large Language Models (LLMs) are artificial intelligence (AI) tools that can process, summarize, and translate texts and predict future words in a sentence, letting the LLM generate sentences similar to how humans talk and write. One concern that needs to be flagged is that, often, the content generated by different LLMs is inaccurate. LLMs are trained on code that can be used to detect data breaches, detect ransomware, and even pinpoint organizational vulnerabilities in advance of a cyberattack. LLMs are new but have unbelievable potential with their ability to generate code that brings awareness to cyber analysts and IT professionals. …