The future Internet of Things (IoT) will have a deep economical, commercial and social impact on our lives. The participating nodes in IoT networks are usually resource-constrained, which makes them luring targets for cyber attacks. In this regard, extensive efforts have been made to address the security and privacy issues in IoT networks primarily through traditional cryptographic approaches. However, the unique characteristics of IoT nodes render the existing solutions insufficient to encompass the entire security spectrum of the IoT networks. Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) techniques, which are able to provide embedded intelligence in the IoT devices and networks, can be leveraged to cope with different security problems. In this paper, we systematically review the security requirements, attack vectors, and the current security solutions for the IoT networks. We then shed light on the gaps in these security solutions that call for ML and DL approaches. Finally, we discuss in detail the existing ML and DL solutions for addressing different security problems in IoT networks. We also discuss several future research directions for ML- and DL-based IoT security.

Machine Learning in IoT Security: Current Solutions and Future Challenges

Emotion recognition represents the position and motion of facial muscles. It contributes significantly in many fields. Current approaches have not obtained good results. This paper aimed to propose a new emotion recognition system based on facial expression images. We enrolled 20 subjects and let each subject pose seven different emotions: happy, sadness, surprise, anger, disgust, fear, and neutral. Afterward, we employed biorthogonal wavelet entropy to extract multiscale features, and used fuzzy multiclass support vector machine to be the classifier. The stratified cross validation was employed as a strict validation model. The statistical analysis showed our method achieved an overall accuracy of 96.77±0.10%. Besides, our method is superior to three state-of-the-art methods. In all, this proposed method is efficient.

Facial Emotion Recognition Based on Biorthogonal Wavelet Entropy, Fuzzy Support Vector Machine, and Stratified Cross Validation

The era of artificial neural network (ANN) began with a simplified application in many fields and remarkable success in pattern recognition (PR) even in manufacturing industries. Although significant progress achieved and surveyed in addressing ANN application to PR challenges, nevertheless, some problems are yet to be resolved like whimsical orientation (the unknown path that cannot be accurately calculated due to its directional position). Other problem includes; object classification, location, scaling, neurons behavior analysis in hidden layers, rule, and template matching. Also, the lack of extant literature on the issues associated with ANN application to PR seems to slow down research focus and progress in the field. Hence, there is a need for state-of-the-art in neural networks application to PR to urgently address the above-highlights problems for more successes. The study furnishes readers with a clearer understanding of the current, and new trend in ANN models that effectively addresses PR challenges to enable research focus and topics. Similarly, the comprehensive review reveals the diverse areas of the success of ANN models and their application to PR. In evaluating the performance of ANN models, some statistical indicators for measuring the performance of the ANN model in many studies were adopted. Such as the use of mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), mean absolute error (MAE), root mean squared error (RMSE), and variance of absolute percentage error (VAPE). The result shows that the current ANN models such as GAN, SAE, DBN, RBM, RNN, RBFN, PNN, CNN, SLP, MLP, MLNN, Reservoir computing, and Transformer models are performing excellently in their application to PR tasks. Therefore, the study recommends the research focus on current models and the development of new models concurrently for more successes in the field.

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Comprehensive Review of Artificial Neural Network Applications to Pattern Recognition

In this paper, we systematically explore the attack surface of the Blockchain technology, with an emphasis on public Blockchains. Towards this goal, we attribute attack viability in the attack surface to 1) the Blockchain cryptographic constructs, 2) the distributed architecture of the systems using Blockchain, and 3) the Blockchain application context. To each of those contributing factors, we outline several attacks, including selfish mining, the 51% attack, DNS attacks, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, consensus delay (due to selfish behavior or distributed denial-of-service attacks), Blockchain forks, orphaned and stale blocks, block ingestion, wallet thefts, smart contract attacks, and privacy attacks. We also explore the causal relationships between these attacks to demonstrate how various attack vectors are connected to one another. A secondary contribution of this work is outlining effective defense measures taken by the Blockchain technology or proposed by researchers to mitigate the effects of these attacks and patch associated vulnerabilities.

Exploring the Attack Surface of Blockchain: A Comprehensive Survey

SARS-COV-2 has roused the scientific community with a call to action to combat the growing pandemic. At the time of this writing, there are as yet no novel antiviral agents or approved vaccines available for deployment as a frontline defense. Understanding the pathobiology of COVID-19 could aid scientists in their discovery of potent antivirals by elucidating unexplored viral pathways. One method for accomplishing this is the leveraging of computational methods to discover new candidate drugs and vaccines in silico. In the last decade, machine learning-based models, trained on specific biomolecules, have offered inexpensive and rapid implementation methods for the discovery of effective viral therapies. Given a target biomolecule, these models are capable of predicting inhibitor candidates in a structural-based manner. If enough data are presented to a model, it can aid the search for a drug or vaccine candidate by identifying patterns within the data. In this review, we focus on the recent advances of COVID-19 drug and vaccine development using artificial intelligence and the potential of intelligent training for the discovery of COVID-19 therapeutics. To facilitate applications of deep learning for SARS-COV-2, we highlight multiple molecular targets of COVID-19, inhibition of which may increase patient survival. Moreover, we present CoronaDB-AI, a dataset of compounds, peptides, and epitopes discovered either in silico or in vitro that can be potentially used for training models in order to extract COVID-19 treatment. The information and datasets provided in this review can be used to train deep learning-based models and accelerate the discovery of effective viral therapies.

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Artificial Intelligence for COVID-19 Drug Discovery and Vaccine Development

The steady growth in the number of deployed Internet of Things (IoT) devices has been paralleled with an equal growth in the number of malicious software (malware) targeting those devices. In this paper, we build a detection mechanism of IoT malware utilizing control flow graphs (CFGs). To motivate for our detection mechanism, we contrast the underlying characteristics of IoT malware to other types of malware—Android malware, which are also Linux-based—across multiple features. The preliminary analyses reveal that the Android malware have high density, strong closeness and betweenness, and a larger number of nodes. We show that IoT malware samples have a large number of edges despite a smaller number of nodes, which demonstrate a richer flow structure and higher complexity. We utilize those various characterizing features as a modality to build a highly effective deep learning-based detection model to detect IoT malware. To test our model, we use CFGs of about 6000 malware and benign IoT disassembled samples, and show a detection accuracy of $\approx 99.66$ %.

Analyzing and Detecting Emerging Internet of Things Malware: A Graph-Based Approach

The control chart patterns are the most commonly used statistical process control (SPC) tools to monitor process changes. When a control chart produces an out-of-control signal, this means that the process has been changed. In this study, a new method based on optimized radial basis function neural network (RBFNN) is proposed for control chart patterns (CCPs) recognition. The proposed method consists of four main modules: feature extraction, feature selection, classification and learning algorithm. In the feature extraction module, shape and statistical features are used. Recently, various shape and statistical features have been presented for the CCPs recognition. In the feature selection module, the association rules (AR) method has been employed to select the best set of the shape and statistical features. In the classifier section, RBFNN is used and finally, in RBFNN, learning algorithm has a high impact on the network performance. Therefore, a new learning algorithm based on the bees algorithm has been used in the learning module. Most studies have considered only six patterns: Normal, Cyclic, Increasing Trend, Decreasing Trend, Upward Shift and Downward Shift. Since three patterns namely Normal, Stratification, and Systematic are very similar to each other and distinguishing them is very difficult, in most studies Stratification and Systematic have not been considered. Regarding to the continuous monitoring and control over the production process and the exact type detection of the problem encountered during the production process, eight patterns have been investigated in this study. The proposed method is tested on a dataset containing 1600 samples (200 samples from each pattern) and the results showed that the proposed method has a very good performance.

Control chart pattern recognition using RBF neural network with new training algorithm and practical features.

IoT malware detection using control flow graph (CFG)-based features and deep learning networks are widely explored. The main goal of this study is to investigate the robustness of such models against adversarial learning. We designed two approaches to craft adversarial IoT software: off-the-shelf methods and Graph Embedding and Augmentation (GEA) method. In the off-the-shelf adversarial learning attack methods, we examine eight different adversarial learning methods to force the model to misclassification. The GEA approach aims to preserve the functionality and practicality of the generated adversarial sample through a careful embedding of a benign sample to a malicious one. Intensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed method, showing that off-the-shelf adversarial attack methods are able to achieve a misclassification rate of 100%. In addition, we observed that the GEA approach is able to misclassify all IoT malware samples as benign. The findings of this work highlight the essential need for more robust detection tools against adversarial learning, including features that are not easy to manipulate, unlike CFG-based features. The implications of the study are quite broad, since the approach challenged in this work is widely used for other applications using graphs.

Adversarial Learning Attacks on Graph-based IoT Malware Detection Systems

Unnatural patterns in the control charts can be associated with a specific set of assignable causes for process variation. Hence, pattern recognition is very useful in identifying the process problems. In this study, a multiclass SVM (SVM) based classifier is proposed because of the promising generalization capability of support vector machines. In the proposed method type-2 fuzzy c-means (T2FCM) clustering algorithm is used to make a SVM system more effective. The fuzzy support vector machine classifier suggested in this paper is composed of three main sub-networks: fuzzy classifier sub-network, SVM sub-network and optimization sub-network. In SVM training, the hyper-parameters plays a very important role in its recognition accuracy. Therefore, cuckoo optimization algorithm (COA) is proposed for selecting appropriate parameters of the classifier. Simulation results showed that the proposed system has very high recognition accuracy.

A novel approach for recognition of control chart patterns: Type-2 fuzzy clustering optimized support vector machine.

The Onion Router (Tor) is designed to support an anonymous communication through end-to-end encryption. To prevent vulnerability of side channel attacks (e.g. website fingerprinting), dummy packet injection modules have been embedded in Tor to conceal trace patterns that are associated with the individual websites. However, recent study shows that current Website Fingerprinting (WF) defenses still generate patterns that may be captured and recognized by the deep learning technology. In this paper, we conduct in-depth analyses of two state-of-the-art WF defense approaches. Then, based on our new observations and insights, we propose a novel defense mechanism using a per-burst injection technique, called Deep Fingerprinting Defender (DFD), against deep learning-based WF attacks. The DFD has two operation modes, one-way and two-way injection. DFD is designed to break the inherent patterns preserved in Tor user’s traces by carefully injecting dummy packets within every burst. We conducted extensive experiments to evaluate the performance of DFD over both closed-world and open-world settings. Our results demonstrate that these two configurations can successfully break the Tor network traffic pattern and achieve a high evasion rate of 86.02% over one-way client-side injection rate of 100%, a promising improvement in comparison with state-of-the-art adversarial trace’s evasion rate of 60%. Moreover, DFD outperforms the state-of-the-art alternatives by requiring lower bandwidth overhead; 14.26% using client-side injection.

Aminollah Khormali

Papers

Analyzing and Detecting Emerging Internet of Things Malware: A Graph-Based Approach

Control chart pattern recognition using RBF neural network with new training algorithm and practical features.

Adversarial Learning Attacks on Graph-based IoT Malware Detection Systems

A novel approach for recognition of control chart patterns: Type-2 fuzzy clustering optimized support vector machine.

DFD: Adversarial Learning-based Approach to Defend Against Website Fingerprinting