Information Security Commons^™

Software-Defined Networking Powered By Ai-Driven Anomaly Detection, Dina Moloja, Vusumuzi Malele Prof

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

Software Defined Networking (SDN) revolutionizes network control by separating the control plane from the data plane. Although the latter improves SDN agility and scalability, it creates a security hole, particularly in a central control plane, leading to SDN environments becoming high-profile targets for advanced cybersecurity threats. Due to static and signature-based point-in-time behavior, traditional security methods are unable to keep up with modern attacks that are an anomaly to SDNs. Artificial Intelligence (AI) with its different applications and techniques, has the capability of detecting SDN cyber threats’ anomalies. This paper presents the results of a literature scoping exercise that used …

Enhancing It Security Management With An Advanced Intrusion Detection System Based On Machine Learning And Explainable Ai, Hanan Alzubaidi

Thesis/ Dissertation Defenses

The fast-changing landscape of cyber threats continues to challenge the development of strong and reliable security frameworks for IT management systems. Traditional defense tools, such as Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS), often struggle to keep up with today’s advanced and constantly evolving attack methods. This thesis explores these ongoing challenges and looks into how machine learning (ML) and explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) can be used to boost IDS performance.

The research outlines a smart, adaptive system that combines supervised learning for real-time threat detection, unsupervised models for anomaly analysis, and proactive defense strategies. The goal is to improve detection accuracy, cut …

Experts’ Validation Of The Fundamental Cybersecurity Competency Index (Fcci) Using A Commercial Cyber Range Through Human-Generative Artificial Intelligence (Genai) Teaming, Dariusz Witko, Yair Levy, Catherine Neubauer, Greg Simco, Laurie P. Dringus, Melissa Carlton

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

The increasing volume of cyber threats, combined with a critical shortage of skilled professionals and rising burnout among practitioners, highlights the urgent need for innovative solutions in cybersecurity operations. Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) offers promising potential to augment human analysts in cybersecurity, but its integration requires rigorous validation of the fundamental competencies that enable effective collaboration of human-GenAI teams. This research study employed a mixed-methods research project designed to evaluate human-GenAI teams, emphasizing the role of expert consensus in shaping the experimental assessment of the Fundamental Cybersecurity Competency Index (FCCI) in a commercial cyber range. We engaged 20 Subject Matter …

Security And Privacy Of Wearable And Implantable Medical Devices: A Course-Based Approach To Medical Device Cybersecurity Education, Michelle M. Ramim

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

As wearable and implantable medical devices become integral to remote patient monitoring and precision medicine, the associated cybersecurity and privacy risks demand urgent attention. These devices are increasingly targeted by cyberattacks, potentially endangering patient safety and data integrity. To address this, we developed an experiential learning course titled Security and Privacy of Wearable and Implantable Medical Devices, designed for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in health and medical fields. The course immerses students in real-world challenges through lectures, labs, and project-based learning, leveraging wearable devices such as FitBit^TM to analyze and interpret real-time personal health data. The curriculum …

Enhancing Cloud-Based Threat Detection Through Explainable Ai: A Comparative Study Of Machine Learning And Xai-Integrated Models, Amna Al Ghaithi

Thesis/ Dissertation Defenses

The rapid adoption of cloud computing brought about serious security concerns, as cloud infrastructures are constantly exposed to cybersecurity threats such as malware and Distributed Denial of Service attacks. Also, on the other hand, current security methodologies have limitations in identifying new threats accurately. Apart from the fact that ML models are highly efficient in detecting attacks, as ‘black boxes,’ they lack interpretability, impacting trust and adoption within vital cloud environments. This research aims to solve this issue by integrating Explainable Artificial Intelligence practices to help enhance both the accuracy and interpretability of AI systems intended to detect threats in …

Enhanced Privacy Preserving Healthcare Data Management With Federated Learning Using Homomorphic Encryption, Omar Abdulla Ali

Thesis/ Dissertation Defenses

Federated Learning (FL) is a decentralized approach of machine learning on multiple clients jointly training models without sharing their raw data, which drastically improves privacy and enhance protection against security breach. However, there is still a risk of privacy breach when clients send their model updates to the central server, because if a model update is intercepted or analyzed by a malicious entity, it could be used to recover sensitive data using inference attack. To address this issue, Homomorphic Encryption (HE) can be applied to protect against the interception, since the model updates remain encrypted during transmission as well as …

Enhanced Privacy Preserving Healthcare Data Management With Federated Learning Using Homomorphic Encryption, Omar Abdulla Ali

Theses

Federated Learning (FL) is a decentralized approach of machine learning on multiple clients jointly training models without sharing their raw data, which drastically improves privacy and enhance protection against security breach. This is particularly critical in the healthcare sector, where hospitals and medical institutions are often unable to exchange patient records due to strict privacy regulations and data-management policies. However, there is still a risk of privacy breach when clients send their model updates to the central server, because if a model update is intercepted or analyzed by a malicious entity, it could be used to recover sensitive data using …

Detecting Data Poisoning Attacks In Medical Imaging: A Study On Chest X-Ray Classification Tasks, Akhila Abdulla Asgar

Theses

This thesis examines the vulnerability of AI medical imaging models to adversarial threats, with a specific focus on data poisoning attacks in chest X-ray classification. The study begins with a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) to assess the existing adversarial attacks and defenses in medical imaging, revealing a significant research gap in studies exploring data poisoning attacks in the medical domain. Based on our literature search, an efficient and lightweight defense, namely friendly noise defense, against data poisoning has not been investigated in medical imaging classification tasks. Hence, in this work, we investigated its effectiveness on the chest X-ray dataset, and …

Startup Success Forecasting Through Machine Learning: A Comprehensive Analysis Of It Startups, Khaled Abdulla Alhassani

Theses

Lately, startups attracted significant attention from investors throughout the previous years. This raised several questions concerning startups and what they possibly define as them. It could refer to collective individuals who focus on innovative ideas with a reproducible and scalable business model; others refer to it as a newly established business. Nevertheless, all these definitions lead to a predictive question. Will these startups face success?

This study explores startup success prediction methods, focusing on forecasting information technology startup (SIT) insights using Machine Learning (ML) models such as Random Forest (RF), Decision Tree (DT), Support Vector Machine (SVM), K-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN), …

Advancing Security Safeguards In Large Language Models Through Multi-Agent Systems, Mohammed Rashed Alnuaimi

Theses

This thesis focused on enhancing the safe use of Large Language Model (LLM) through the innovative use of a Multi-Agent System (MAS). As LLMs like ChatGPT became essential to our everyday interactions, the need to maintain the safe use of these systems increased. This research thoroughly assessed the current security measures in place for LLM, pointed out their limitations and developed new and more effective security strategies. The core of the proposed solution was a MAS designed to ensure that all data processed by LLM met guidelines including Privacy, Confidentiality, and Ethical standards before reaching the user. The system involved …

Evaluating Large Language Models For Automated Cv Ranking: A Hybrid Embedding Approach For Enhanced Recruitment, Sarah Mohamed Alhindaassi

Theses

Increasing numbers of applications have revealed limitations in legacy keyword-filtering-based Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS), which commonly overlook candidate potential and ignore contextual or transferable skills. Advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Large Language Models (LLMs) offer an exhilarating alternative, supporting context-sensitive and human-crafted reasoning in candidate evaluation. This thesis systematically evaluates four classes of approaches, lexical models, embedding-based methods, Large Language Models (LLMs), and hybrid ensembles, for automation of Curriculum Vitae (CV) to Job Description (JD) matching without exploiting prior annotations or annotations at match time. Using a combination of publicly available datasets and real-world sample data covering three …

Security Modelling For Cyber-Physical Systems: A Systematic Literature Review, Shao Fei Huang, Christopher M. Poskitt, Lwin Khin Shar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cyber-physical systems are at the intersection of digital technology and engineering domains, rendering them high-value targets of sophisticated and well-funded cybersecurity threat actors. Prominent cybersecurity attacks on CPS have brought attention to the vulnerability of these systems and the inherent weaknesses of critical infrastructure reliant on them. Security modelling for CPS is an important mechanism to systematically identify and assess vulnerabilities, threats, and risks throughout system life cycles, and to ultimately ensure system resilience, safety, and reliability. This survey delves into state-of-the-art research on CPS security modelling, encompassing both threat and attack modelling. While these terms are sometimes used interchangeably, …

Disc: Decentralized Identity System With Self-Sovereign Credential Aggregation, Yang Yang, Wai Keung Ching, Minming Huang, Supachate Innet, Guomin Yang, Hwee Hwa Pang, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The evolution of decentralized identity (DID) and self-sovereign identity (SSI) frameworks, as endorsed by W3C Verifiable Credentials (VC) and eIDAS 2.0, underscores the need for secure, efficient, and privacy-preserving credential management. However, existing credential systems often depend on centralized issuers, lack efficient aggregation mechanisms, or fail to ensure unlinkability across authentication sessions. To address these challenges, we propose DISC (Decentralized Identity System with Self-Sovereign Credential Aggregation), a novel credential system that enables multi-authority credential issuance, user-controlled credential aggregation, and unlinkable authentication. DISC allows users to aggregate credentials from multiple issuers while maintaining constant-size authentication tokens and supporting batch verification for …

Higher Education Cybersecurity: A Vulnerability Assessment Of The U.S. South’S Institutional Websites, Zachary W. Taylor, Vivi Vo

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

As technology continues to advance, it is critical to understand how higher education institutions protect digital information of their stakeholders including students, faculty, and staff through cybersecurity measures. Although conceptual research has articulated various aspects of cybersecurity, no empirical research has explored the cybersecurity of higher education (.edu) websites through a vulnerability scan of these websites via an open PortScan and analysis. To fill a critical gap in the literature, this study conducted a vulnerability scan and open PortScan and analysis of all higher education websites in three of the lowest-income states in the United States: Louisiana (n=112), Mississippi (n=52), …

Cross-Model Watermarking Via Discriminative Samples For Secure Authentication, Juan Zhao, Yudao Sun, Zhihai Yang, Cai Xu, Hongji Chen, Fan Zhang, Jianxin Li

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

Deep neural networks on cloud platforms face growing security threats, with AI services increasingly relying on heterogeneous models for the same task to meet diverse user needs. Existing methods fail to distinguish benign modifications from malicious attacks in cross-model scenarios. To address this challenge, we propose a non-intrusive cross-model watermarking method that generates discriminative samples as universal keys, enabling authentication without altering model parameters or architectures. Specifically, we introduce a margin enhancement loss to amplify confidence gaps between benign and malicious behaviors, ensuring high transferability across models. Both theoretical analysis and experimental results demonstrate the high efficacy of our proposed …

Deep Learning Based Contactless Fingerprint Identification, Mohammad Alsmirat, M. Moneb Khaled, Aghyad A.L. Sayadi

Faculty Publications

Biometric authentication systems, particularly contactless fingerprint methods, offer enhanced security and convenience across various domains like access control, law enforcement, and finance. Despite these advantages, contactless systems face significant challenges related to image quality, finger orientation, and environmental factors. To address this, our paper presents the first extensive deep learning-based study on contactless fingerprint recognition using a large dataset of 2,143 images from 175 individuals. Our proposed approach integrates state-of-the-art preprocessing techniques with deep learning models to boost identification performance. After studying various transfer learning models, we achieved a high accuracy of 93.5%. We also conducted two further studies on …

Impact Of Information Security Awareness Training On Knowledge, Attitude, And Behavior: A K-12 Case Study, Michael S. Robbins, Christopher Robbins

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

Abstract— Information security breaches remain a serious threat across all sectors, often exploiting human factors rather than technical flaws. This study examines how a structured Information Security Awareness (ISA) training program influences employees’ knowledge of security policies, attitudes towards those policies, and self-reported security behaviors within a K-12 educational environment. A quantitative pre-test/post-test design was employed with 201 staff members (administrators, teachers, and support personnel) in a public school district. Participants completed the Human Aspects of Information Security Questionnaire (HAIS-Q) before and after undergoing an interactive cybersecurity training program. Statistical analysis revealed a significant improvement in information security knowledge, attitudes, …

Prompt Engineering For Genai In Cybersecurity Incident Response: A Multi-Platform Evaluation Based On Nice Pr-Ir-001, Yuanyuan Liu

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

This study explores the application of prompt engineering in cybersecurity education, mainly by evaluating the performance of different generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) platforms when performing tasks consistent with the NICE framework role pr-ir-001 - Network Defense Incident Responder. The study employed structured prompts designed for a medical technology environment compliant with HIPAA and NIST SP 800-53, while the tasks of the three GenAI models (GPT-4, Gemini, and DeepSeek) were to generate event response scenarios. Their outputs will be evaluated from four aspects: accuracy, relevance, clarity and completeness.

The results show that the three models differ in depth and consistency, but …

Arizona’S Experiential Learning Opportunities: Regional Security Operations Centers And Cybersecurity Clinics, Joshua Kipers, Paul Wagner, Robert J. Honomichl

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

The increasing frequency, sophistication, and economic impact of cybersecurity incidents have intensified the global demand for a skilled cybersecurity workforce. Traditional academic programs often fail to provide the applied experience necessary to prepare graduates for the rapidly evolving threat landscape. This paper examines Arizona’s innovative approaches to experiential cybersecurity education through the establishment of Regional Security Operations Centers (RSOCs) and the Arizona Cybersecurity Clinic. These initiatives integrate Kolb’s Experiential Learning Theory and the NICE Cybersecurity Workforce Framework to align academic preparation with real-world practice. The RSOCs, supported by the Arizona Department of Homeland Security, provide paid student internships focused on …

Static Malware Analysis For Incident Response: Developing A Tactical Aid With Ember, Joel Meoak, Shengjie Xu

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

Incident responders face a variety of challenges when identifying malware using existing solutions, particularly when rapid tactical decisions are needed. Traditional malware detection methods are often signature-based, limiting their effectiveness to previously known threats detected by anti-virus (AV) engines. Online analysis tools introduce confidentiality risks, potentially alerting adversaries that their actions are under scrutiny. While free sandbox environments offer useful capabilities, they often require substantial setup time and hardware resources that may not be available in the field. This research leverages the Elastic Malware Benchmark for Empowering Researchers (EMBER) dataset to develop a lightweight, portable tactical decision aid that enables …