Machine-learning based intrusion detection classifiers are able to detect unknown attacks, but at the same time they may be susceptible to evasion by obfuscation techniques. An adversary intruder which possesses a crucial knowledge about a protection system can easily bypass the detection module. The main objective of our work is to improve the performance capabilities of intrusion detection classifiers against such adversaries. To this end, we firstly propose several obfuscation techniques of remote attacks that are based on the modification of various properties of network connections; then we conduct a set of comprehensive experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of intrusion detection classifiers against obfuscated attacks. We instantiate our approach by means of a tool, based on NetEm and Metasploit, which implements our obfuscation operators on any TCP communication. This allows us to generate modified network traffic for machine learning experiments employing features for assessing network statistics and behavior of TCP connections. We perform evaluation on five classifiers: Gaussian Naïve Bayes, Gaussian Naïve Bayes with kernel density estimation, Logistic Regression, Decision Tree, and Support Vector Machines. Our experiments confirm the assumption that it is possible to evade the intrusion detection capability of all classifiers trained without prior knowledge about obfuscated attacks, causing an exacerbation of the TPR ranging from 7.8% to 66.8%. Further, when widening the training knowledge of the classifiers by a subset of obfuscated attacks, we achieve a significant improvement of the TPR by 4.21% -73.3%, while the FPR is deteriorated only slightly (0.1% -1.48%). Finally, we test the capability of an obfuscations-aware classifier to detect unknown obfuscated attacks, where we achieve over 90% detection rate on average for most of the obfuscations. intrusion detection suffers from undetected attacks such as zero-day attacks or polymorphism, enabling an exploit-code to avoid positive signature matching of the packet payload data. Therefore, researchers and developers are motivated to design new methods to detect various versions of the modified network attacks including the zero-day ones. These goals motivate the popularity of Anomaly Detection Systems (ADS) and also the classification approaches in the context 1 EAI Endorsed Transactions Preprint

Blockchains are distributed systems, in which security is a critical factor for their success. However, despite their increasing popularity and adoption, there is a lack of standardized models that study blockchain-related security threats. To fill this gap, the main focus of our work is to systematize and extend the knowledge about the security and privacy aspects of blockchains and contribute to the standardization of this domain.We propose the security reference architecture (SRA) for blockchains, which adopts a stacked model (similar to the ISO/OSI) describing the nature and hierarchy of various security and privacy aspects. The SRA contains four layers: (1) the network layer, (2) the consensus layer, (3) the replicated state machine layer, and (4) the application layer. At each of these layers, we identify known security threats, their origin, and countermeasures, while we also analyze several cross-layer dependencies. Next, to enable better reasoning about security aspects of blockchains by the practitioners, we propose a blockchain-specific version of the threat-risk assessment standard ISO/IEC 15408 by embedding the stacked model into this standard. Finally, we provide designers of blockchain platforms and applications with a design methodology following the model of SRA and its hierarchy.

Insider threats are one of today’s most challenging cybersecurity issues that are not well addressed by commonly employed security solutions. In this work, we propose structural taxonomy and novel categorization of research that contribute to the organization and disambiguation of insider threat incidents and the defense solutions used against them. The objective of our categorization is to systematize knowledge in insider threat research while using an existing grounded theory method for rigorous literature review. The proposed categorization depicts the workflow among particular categories that include incidents and datasets, analysis of incidents, simulations, and defense solutions. Special attention is paid to the definitions and taxonomies of the insider threat; we present a structural taxonomy of insider threat incidents that is based on existing taxonomies and the 5W1H questions of the information gathering problem. Our survey will enhance researchers’ efforts in the domain of insider threat because it provides (1) a novel structural taxonomy that contributes to orthogonal classification of incidents and defining the scope of defense solutions employed against them, (2) an overview on publicly available datasets that can be used to test new detection solutions against other works, (3) references of existing case studies and frameworks modeling insiders’ behaviors for the purpose of reviewing defense solutions or extending their coverage, and (4) a discussion of existing trends and further research directions that can be used for reasoning in the insider threat domain.

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Due to their interesting features, blockchains have become popular in recent years. They are full-stack systems where security is a critical factor for their success. The main focus of this work is to systematize knowledge about security and privacy issues of blockchains. To this end, we propose a security reference architecture based on models that demonstrate the stacked hierarchy of various threats (similar to the ISO/OSI hierarchy) as well as threat-risk assessment using ISO/IEC 15408. In contrast to the previous surveys [39], [8], [139], [20], we focus on the categorization of security incidents based on their origins and using the proposed architecture we present existing prevention and mitigation techniques. The scope of our work mainly covers aspects related to decentralized nature of blockchains, while we mention common operational security issues and countermeasures only tangentially.Index Terms-blockchain • distributed ledgers • reference architecture • threat-risk assessment arXiv:1904.06898v1 [cs.CR]

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There are distinguished two categories of intrusion detection approaches utilizing machine learning according to type of input data. The first one represents network intrusion detection techniques which consider only data captured in network traffic. The second one represents general intrusion detection techniques which intake all possible data sources including host-based features as well as network-based ones. The paper demonstrates various convergence optimization experiments of a backpropagation artificial neural network using well know NSL-KDD 1999 dataset, and thus, representing the general intrusion detection. Experiments evaluating usefulness of stratified sampling on input dataset and simulated annealing employed into the backpropagation learning algorithm are performed. Both techniques provide improvement of backpropagation's learning convergence as well as classification accuracy. After 50 training cycles, classification accuracy of 84.20% is achieved when utilizing stratified sampling and accuracy of 86.5% when both stratified sampling and simulated annealing are used. In contrast, the backpropagation by itself reaches only 76.63% accuracy. Comparing to state-of-the-art work introducing the NSL-KDD dataset, there is achieved accuracy higher about 4.5%.

Voting is a means to agree on a collective decision based on available choices (e.g., candidates), where participants (voters) agree to abide by their outcome. To improve trust in voting, decentralized solutions based on a blockchain can be employed. A blockchain ensures that all entities in the voting system have the same view of the actions made by others due to the immutable log. Existing blockchain-based boardroom voting implementation called Open Voting Network (OVN) supports only two candidates. We present a blockchain-based approach for decentralized 1-out-of-k voting and provide a cost-optimized implementation using Ethereum. We resolve the problem of stalling participants by a fault recovery protocol. Finally, we compare our implementation with OVN and show that our work decreases the costs for voters by 13.5% in terms of gas consumption.