Faculty Publications

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    Machine Learning-Based Malware Detection and Classification in Encrypted TLS Traffic
    (Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH, 2023) Kashyap, H.; Pais, A.R.; Kondaiah, C.
    Malware has become a significant threat to Internet users in the modern digital era. Malware spreads quickly and poses a significant threat to cyber security. As a result, network security measures play an important role in countering these cyber threats. Existing malware detection techniques are unable to detect them effectively. A novel Ensemble Machine Learning (ML)-based malware detection technique from Transport Layer Security (TLS)-encrypted traffic without decryption is proposed in this paper. The features are extracted from TLS traffic. Based on the extracted features, malware detection is performed using Ensemble ML algorithms. The benign and malware file datasets are created using features extracted from TLS traffic. According to the experimental results, the 65 new extracted features perform well in detecting malware from encrypted traffic. The proposed method achieves an accuracy of 99.85% for random forest and 97.43% for multiclass classification for identifying malware families. The ensemble model achieved an accuracy of 99.74% for binary classification and 97.45% for multiclass classification. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
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    Enhanced Malicious Traffic Detection in Encrypted Communication Using TLS Features and a Multi-class Classifier Ensemble
    (Springer, 2024) Kondaiah, C.; Pais, A.R.; Rao, R.S.
    The use of encryption for network communication leads to a significant challenge in identifying malicious traffic. The existing malicious traffic detection techniques fail to identify malicious traffic from the encrypted traffic without decryption. The current research focuses on feature extraction and malicious traffic classification from the encrypted network traffic without decryption. In this paper, we propose an ensemble model using Deep Learning (DL), Machine Learning (ML), and self-attention-based methods. Also, we propose novel TLS features extracted from the network and perform experimentation on the ensemble model. The experimental results demonstrated that the ML-based (RF, LGBM, XGB) ensemble model achieved a significant accuracy of 94.85% whereas the other ensemble model using RF, LSTM, and Bi-LSTM with self-attention technique achieved an accuracy of 96.71%. To evaluate the efficacy of our proposed models, we curated datasets encompassing both phishing, legitimate and malware websites, leveraging features extracted from TLS 1.2 and 1.3 traffic without decryption. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2024.
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    TrackPhish: A Multi-Embedding Attention-Enhanced 1D CNN Model for Phishing URL Detection
    (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc., 2025) Kondaiah, C.; Pais, A.R.; Rao, R.S.
    Phishing attacks are a growing threat to online security, with increasingly sophisticated and frequent tactics. This rise in cyber threats underscores the need for advanced detection methods. While the Internet is crucial for modern communication and commerce, it also exposes users to risks such as phishing, spamming, malware, and performance degradation attacks. Among these, malicious URLs, commonly embedded in static links within emails and websites, are a significant challenge in identifying and mitigating these attacks. This study proposes TrackPhish, a novel lightweight application that predicts URL legitimacy without visiting the associated website. The proposed model combines traditional word embeddings (Word2Vec, FastText, GloVe) with transformer models (BERT, RoBERTa, GPT-2) to create a comprehensive feature set fed into a Deep Learning (DL) model for detecting phishing URLs. The integration of these embeddings captures semantic relationships and contextual understanding of the text, generating a robust feature set enhanced by an attention mechanism to choose relevant features. The refined features are then used to train a One-Dimensional Convolutional Neural Network (1D CNN) model for phishing URL detection. The proposed model offers key advantages over existing methods, including independence from third-party features, adaptability for client-side deployment, and target-independent detection. Experimental results demonstrate the model’s effectiveness, achieving 95.41% accuracy with a low false positive rate of 1.44% on our dataset and an impressive 98.55% accuracy on benchmark datasets, outperforming existing baseline models. The proposed model represents a significant advancement over traditional methods, enhancing online security against phishing URLs. © 2005-2012 IEEE.