Faculty Publications

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    Deep learning architecture for big data analytics in detecting intrusions and malicious URL
    (Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2019) Harikrishnan, N.B.; Ravi, R.; Padannayil, K.P.; Poornachandran, P.; Annappa, A.; Alazab, M.
    Security attacks are one of the major threats in today’s world. These attacks exploit the vulnerabilities in a system or online sites for financial gain. By doing so, there arises a huge loss in revenue and reputation for both government and private firms. These attacks are generally carried out through malware interception, intrusions, phishing uniform resource locator (URL). There are techniques like signature-based detection, anomaly detection, state full protocol to detect intrusions, blacklisting for detecting phishing URL. Even though these techniques claim to thwart cyberattacks, they often fail to detect new attacks or variants of existing attacks. The second reason why these techniques fail is the dynamic nature of attacks and lack of annotated data. In such a situation, we need to propose a system which can capture the changing trends of cyberattacks to some extent. For this, we used supervised and unsupervised learning techniques. The growing problem of intrusions and phishing URLs generates a need for a reliable architectural-based solution that can efficiently identify intrusions and phishing URLs. This chapter aims to provide a comprehensive survey of intrusion and phishing URL detection techniques and deep learning. It presents and evaluates a highly effective deep learning architecture to automat intrusion and phishing URL Detection. The proposed method is an artificial intelligence (AI)-based hybrid architecture for an organization which provides supervised and unsupervised-based solutions to tackle intrusions, and phishing URL detection. The prototype model uses various classical machine learning (ML) classifiers and deep learning architectures. The research specifically focuses on detecting and classifying intrusions and phishing URL detection. © The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2020.
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    Reputation-based cross-layer intrusion detection system for wormhole attacks in wireless mesh networks
    (John Wiley and Sons Inc 410 Park Avenue, 15th Floor, 287 pmb New York NY 10022, 2014) Karri, G.R.; Santhi Thilagam, P.
    Wireless mesh networks provide long-distance wireless network connectivity over heterogeneous devices for greater scalability and availability. However, protecting legitimate long-distance wireless links from wormhole attacks is an important yet challenging security issue in wireless mesh networks. In this paper, we propose a reputation-based cross-layer intrusion detection system to effectively detect various wormhole attacks. The proposed system analyses the behaviours of the routing paths in wireless mesh networks to correctly isolate the malicious wormhole paths from legitimate long-distance wireless links. It uses reputation and cross-layer parameters for comprehensive ability to isolate the wormhole attacks in routing paths. This isolation ensures full utilisation of legitimate long-distance wireless links in wireless mesh networks, which is not possible with the existing wormhole attack detection approaches. Experimental results show that the proposed system increases the detection rate, decreases the false alarm rate, and secures legitimate long-distance wireless links in wireless mesh networks. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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    Leveraging virtual machine introspection with memory forensics to detect and characterize unknown malware using machine learning techniques at hypervisor
    (Elsevier Ltd, 2017) M.a, M.A.; Jaidhar, C.D.
    The Virtual Machine Introspection (VMI) has emerged as a fine-grained, out-of-VM security solution that detects malware by introspecting and reconstructing the volatile memory state of the live guest Operating System (OS). Specifically, it functions by the Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM), or hypervisor. The reconstructed semantic details obtained by the VMI are available in a combination of benign and malicious states at the hypervisor. In order to distinguish between these two states, the existing out-of-VM security solutions require extensive manual analysis. In this paper, we propose an advanced VMM-based, guest-assisted Automated Internal-and-External (A-IntExt) introspection system by leveraging VMI, Memory Forensics Analysis (MFA), and machine learning techniques at the hypervisor. Further, we use the VMI-based technique to introspect digital artifacts of the live guest OS to obtain a semantic view of the processes details. We implemented an Intelligent Cross View Analyzer (ICVA) and implanted it into our proposed A-IntExt system, which examines the data supplied by the VMI to detect hidden, dead, and dubious processes, while also predicting early symptoms of malware execution on the introspected guest OS in a timely manner. Machine learning techniques are used to analyze the executables that are mined and extracted using MFA-based techniques and ascertain the malicious executables. The practicality of the A-IntExt system is evaluated by executing large real-world malware and benign executables onto the live guest OSs. The evaluation results achieved 99.55% accuracy and 0.004 False Positive Rate (FPR) on the 10-fold cross-validation to detect unknown malware on the generated dataset. Additionally, the proposed system was validated against other benchmarked malware datasets and the A-IntExt system outperforms the detection of real-world malware at the VMM with performance exceeding 6.3%. © 2017 Elsevier Ltd
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    Automated multi-level malware detection system based on reconstructed semantic view of executables using machine learning techniques at VMM
    (Elsevier B.V., 2018) M.a, A.K.; Jaidhar, C.D.
    In order to fulfill the requirements like stringent timing restraints and demand on resources, Cyber–Physical System (CPS) must deploy on the virtualized environment such as cloud computing. To protect Virtual Machines (VMs) in which CPSs are functioning against malware-based attacks, malware detection and mitigation technique is emerging as a highly crucial concern. The traditional VM-based anti-malware software themselves a potential target for malware-based attack since they are easily subverted by sophisticated malware. Thus, a reliable and robust malware monitoring and detection systems are needed to detect and mitigate rapidly the malware based cyber-attacks in real time particularly for virtualized environment. The Virtual Machine Introspection (VMI) has emerged as a fine-grained out-of-VM security solution to detect malware by introspecting and reconstructing the volatile memory state of the live guest Operating System (OS) by functioning at the Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) or hypervisor. However, the reconstructed semantic details by the VMI are available in a combination of benign and malicious states at the hypervisor. In order to distinguish between these two states, extensive manual analysis is required by the existing out-of-VM security solutions. To address the foremost issue, in this paper, we propose an advanced VMM-based guest-assisted Automated Multilevel Malware Detection System (AMMDS) that leverages both VMI and Memory Forensic Analysis (MFA) techniques to predict early symptoms of malware execution by detecting stealthy hidden processes on a live guest OS. More specifically, the AMMDS system detects and classifies the actual running malicious executables from the semantically reconstructed process view of the guest OS. The two sub-components of the AMMDS are: Online Malware Detector (OMD) and Offline Malware Classifier (OFMC). The OMD recognizes whether the running processes are benign or malicious using its Local Malware Signature Database (LMSD) and online malware scanner and the OFMC classify unknown malware by adopting machine learning techniques at the hypervisor. The AMMDS has been evaluated by executing large real-world malware and benign executables on to the live guest OSs. The evaluation results achieved 100% of accuracy and zero False Positive Rate (FPR) on the 10-fold cross-validation in classifying unknown malware with maximum performance overhead of 5.8%. © 2017 Elsevier B.V.
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    A secure and lightweight authentication scheme for roaming service in global mobile networks
    (Elsevier Ltd, 2018) Madhusudhan, R.; Shashidhara
    Global Mobile Network provides global roaming service to the users moving from one network to another. It is essential to authenticate and protect the privacy of roaming users. Recently, Marimuthu and Saravanan proposed a secure authentication scheme for roaming service in mobile networks. This scheme can protect user anonymity, untraceability, and is believed to have many abilities to resist a range of attacks in global mobile networks. In this paper, we analyse the security strength of their scheme and show that the authentication protocol is in fact insecure against insider attack, stolen-verifier attack, impersonation attack, denial-of-service attack, synchronization problem, lack of user anonymity and operational inefficiencies. Hence, we propose a secure and lightweight authentication scheme for Global Mobile Networks. In addition, the proposed scheme requires few message exchanges between the entities such as MU (Mobile User), FA (Foreign Agent) and HA (Home Agent). The scheme ensures both communication and computation efficiency as compared to the well-known authentication schemes. The performance analysis shows that the proposed authentication scheme is well suited for resource limited wireless and mobile environments. © 2017 Elsevier Ltd
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    Windows malware detection system based on LSVC recommended hybrid features
    (Springer-Verlag France 22, Rue de Palestro Paris 75002, 2019) Shiva Darshan, S.L.; Jaidhar, C.D.
    To combat exponentially evolved modern malware, an effective Malware Detection System and precise malware classification is highly essential. In this paper, the Linear Support Vector Classification (LSVC) recommended Hybrid Features based Malware Detection System (HF-MDS) has been proposed. It uses a combination of the static and dynamic features of the Portable Executable (PE) files as hybrid features to identify unknown malware. The application program interface calls invoked by the PE files during their execution along with their correspondent category are collected and considered as dynamic features from the PE file behavioural report produced by the Cuckoo Sandbox. The PE files’ header details such as optional header, disk operating system header, and file header are treated as static features. The LSVC is used as a feature selector to choose prominent static and dynamic features from their respective Original Feature Space. The features recommended by the LSVC are highly discriminative and used as final features for the classification process. Different sets of experiments were conducted using real-world malware samples to verify the combination of static and dynamic features, which encourage the classifier to attain high accuracy. The tenfold cross-validation experimental results demonstrate that the proposed HF-MDS is proficient in precisely detecting malware and benign PE files by attaining detection accuracy of 99.743% with sequential minimal optimization classifier consisting of hybrid features. © 2018, Springer-Verlag France SAS, part of Springer Nature.
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    Jail-Phish: An improved search engine based phishing detection system
    (Elsevier Ltd, 2019) Rao, R.S.; Pais, A.R.
    Stealing of sensitive information (username, password, credit card information and social security number, etc.) using a fake webpage that imitates trusted website is termed as phishing. Recent techniques use search engine based approach to counter the phishing attacks as it achieves promising detection accuracy. But, the limitation of this approach is that it fails when phishing page is hosted on compromised server. Moreover, it also results in low true negative rate when newly registered or non-popular domains are encountered. Hence, in this paper, we propose an application named as Jail-Phish, which improves the accuracy of the search engine based techniques with an ability to detect the Phishing Sites Hosted on Compromised Servers (PSHCS) and also detection of newly registered legitimate sites. Jail-Phish compares the suspicious site and matched domain in the search results for calculating the similarity score between them. There exists some degree of similarity such as logos, favicons, images, scripts, styles, and anchorlinks within the pages of the same website whereas on the other side, the dissimilarity within the pages is very high in PSHCS. Hence, we use the similarity score between the suspicious site and matched domain as a parameter to detect the PSHCS. From the experimental results, it is observed that Jail-Phish achieved an accuracy of 98.61%, true positive rate of 97.77% and false positive rate less than 0.64%. © 2019 Elsevier Ltd
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    Detection of phishing websites using an efficient feature-based machine learning framework
    (Springer London, 2019) Rao, R.S.; Pais, A.R.
    Phishing is a cyber-attack which targets naive online users tricking into revealing sensitive information such as username, password, social security number or credit card number etc. Attackers fool the Internet users by masking webpage as a trustworthy or legitimate page to retrieve personal information. There are many anti-phishing solutions such as blacklist or whitelist, heuristic and visual similarity-based methods proposed to date, but online users are still getting trapped into revealing sensitive information in phishing websites. In this paper, we propose a novel classification model, based on heuristic features that are extracted from URL, source code, and third-party services to overcome the disadvantages of existing anti-phishing techniques. Our model has been evaluated using eight different machine learning algorithms and out of which, the Random Forest (RF) algorithm performed the best with an accuracy of 99.31%. The experiments were repeated with different (orthogonal and oblique) random forest classifiers to find the best classifier for the phishing website detection. Principal component analysis Random Forest (PCA-RF) performed the best out of all oblique Random Forests (oRFs) with an accuracy of 99.55%. We have also tested our model with the third-party-based features and without third-party-based features to determine the effectiveness of third-party services in the classification of suspicious websites. We also compared our results with the baseline models (CANTINA and CANTINA+). Our proposed technique outperformed these methods and also detected zero-day phishing attacks. © 2018, The Natural Computing Applications Forum.
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    Experimental analysis of Android malware detection based on combinations of permissions and API-calls
    (Springer-Verlag France 22, Rue de Palestro Paris 75002, 2019) Singh, A.K.; Jaidhar, C.D.; M.a, M.A.A.
    Android-based smartphones are gaining popularity, due to its cost efficiency and various applications. These smartphones provide the full experience of a computing device to its user, and usually ends up being used as a personal computer. Since the Android operating system is open-source software, many contributors are adding to its development to make the interface more attractive and tweaking the performance. In order to gain more popularity, many refined versions are being offered to customers, whose feedback will enable it to be made even more powerful and user-friendly. However, this has attracted many malicious code-writers to gain anonymous access to the user’s private data. Moreover, the malware causes an increase of resource consumption. To prevent this, various techniques are currently being used that include static analysis-based detection and dynamic analysis-based detection. But, due to the enhancement in Android malware code-writing techniques, some of these techniques are getting overwhelmed. Therefore, there is a need for an effective Android malware detection approach for which experimental studies were conducted in the present work using the static features of the Android applications such as Standard Permissions with Application Programming Interface (API) calls, Non-standard Permissions with API-calls, API-calls with Standard and Nonstandard Permissions. To select the prominent features, Feature Selection Techniques (FSTs) such as the BI-Normal Separation (BNS), Mutual Information (MI), Relevancy Score (RS), and the Kullback-Leibler (KL) were employed and their effectiveness was measured using the Linear-Support Vector Machine (L-SVM) classifier. It was observed that this classifier achieved Android malware detection accuracy of 99.6% for the combined features as recommended by the BI-Normal Separation FST. © 2019, Springer-Verlag France SAS, part of Springer Nature.
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    Crime base: Towards building a knowledge base for crime entities and their relationships from online news papers
    (Elsevier Ltd, 2019) Srinivasa, S.; Santhi Thilagam, P.
    In the current era of internet, information related to crime is scattered across many sources namely news media, social networks, blogs, and video repositories, etc. Crime reports published in online newspapers are often considered as reliable compared to crowdsourced data like social media and contain crime information not only in the form of unstructured text but also in the form of images. Given the volume and availability of crime-related information present in online newspapers, gathering and integrating crime entities from multiple modalities and representing them as a knowledge base in machine-readable form will be useful for any law enforcement agencies to analyze and prevent criminal activities. Extant research works to generate the crime knowledge base, does not address extraction of all non-redundant entities from text and image data present in multiple newspapers. Hence, this work proposes Crime Base, an entity relationship based system to extract and integrate crime related text and image data from online newspapers with a focus towards reducing duplicity and loss of information in the knowledge base. The proposed system uses a rule-based approach to extract the entities from text and image captions. The entities extracted from text data are correlated using contextual as-well-as semantic similarity measures and image entities are correlated using low-level and high-level image features. The proposed system also presents an integrated view of these entities and their relations in the form of a knowledge base using OWL. The system is tested for a collection of crime related articles from popular Indian online newspapers. © 2019 Elsevier Ltd