As network services progressively become essential communication and information delivery mechanisms of business operations and individuals¡¦ activities, a challenging network management issue emerges: network service misuse. Network service misuse is formally defined as ¡§abuses or unethical, surreptitious, unauthorized, or illegal uses of network services by those who attempt to mask their uses or presence that evade the management and monitoring of network or system administrators.¡¨ Misuses of network services would inappropriately use resources of network service providers (i.e., server machines), compromise the confidentiality of information maintained in network service providers, and/or prevent other users from using the network normally and securely. Motivated by importance of network service misuse detection, we attempt to exploit the use of router-based network traffic data for facilitating the detection of network service misuses. Specifically, in this thesis study, we propose a cross-training method for learning and predicting network service types from router-based network traffic data. In addition, we also propose two network service misuse detection systems for detecting underground FTP servers and interactive backdoors, respectively. Our evaluations suggest that the proposed cross-training method (specifically, NN->C4.5) outperforms traditional classification analysis techniques (namely C4.5, backpropagation neural network, and Naïve Bayes classifier). In addition, our empirical evaluation conducted in a real-world setting suggests that the proposed underground FTP server detection system could effectively identify underground FTP servers, achieving a recall rate of 95% and a precision rate of 34% (by the NN->C4.5 cross-training technique). Moreover, our empirical evaluation also suggests that the proposed interactive backdoor detection system have the capability in capturing ¡§true¡¨ (or more precisely, highly suspicious) interactive backdoors existing in a real-world network environment.

<p>With the fast spread of machine learning techniques, sharing and adopting public deep neural networks become very popular. As deep neural networks are not intuitive for human to understand, malicious behaviors can be injected into deep neural networks undetected. We call it trojan attack or backdoor attack on neural networks. Trojaned models operate normally when regular inputs are provided, and misclassify to a specific output label when the input is stamped with some special pattern called trojan trigger. Deploying trojaned models can cause various severe consequences including endangering human lives (in applications like autonomous driving). Trojan attacks on deep neural networks introduce two challenges. From the attacker's perspective, since the training data or training process is usually not accessible to the attacker, the attacker needs to find a way to carry out the trojan attack without access to training data. From the user's perspective, the user needs to quickly scan the online public deep neural networks and detect trojaned models.</p> <p>We try to address these challenges in this dissertation. For trojan attack without access to training data, We propose to invert the neural network to generate a general trojan trigger, and then retrain the model with reverse-engineered training data to inject malicious behaviors to the model. The malicious behaviors are only activated by inputs stamped with the trojan trigger. To scan and detect trojaned models, we develop a novel technique that analyzes inner neuron behaviors by determining how output activation change when we introduce different levels of stimulation to a neuron. A trojan trigger is then reverse-engineered through an optimization procedure using the stimulation analysis results, to confirm that a neuron is truly compromised. Furthermore, for complex trojan attacks, we propose a novel complex trigger detection method. It leverages a novel symmetric feature differencing method to distinguish features of injected complex triggers from natural features. For trojan attacks on NLP models, we propose a novel backdoor scanning technique. It transforms a subject model to an equivalent but differentiable form. It then inverts a distribution of words denoting their likelihood in the trigger and applies a novel word discriminativity analysis to determine if the subject model is particularly discriminative for the presence of likely trigger words.</p>

<p>Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI), or more precisely on Neural Networks (NNs), and fast processing technologies (e.g. Graphic Processing Units or GPUs) in recent years have positioned NNs as one of the main machine learning algorithms used to solved a diversity of problems in both academia and the industry. While they have been proved to be effective in solving many tasks, the lack of security guarantees and understanding of their internal processing disrupts their wide adoption in general and cybersecurity-related applications. In this dissertation, we present the findings of a comprehensive study aimed to enable the absorption of state-of-the-art NN algorithms in the development of enterprise solutions. Specifically, this dissertation focuses on (1) the development of defensive mechanisms to protect NNs against adversarial attacks and (2) application of NN models for anomaly detection in enterprise networks.</p><p>In this state of affairs, this work makes the following contributions. First, we performed a thorough study of the different adversarial attacks against NNs. We concentrate on the attacks referred to as trojan attacks and introduce a novel model hardening method that removes any trojan (i.e. misbehavior) inserted to the NN models at training time. We carefully evaluate our method and establish the correct metrics to test the efficiency of defensive methods against these types of attacks: (1) accuracy with benign data, (2) attack success rate, and (3) accuracy with adversarial data. Prior work evaluates their solutions using the first two metrics only, which do not suffice to guarantee robustness against untargeted attacks. Our method is compared with the state-of-the-art. The obtained results show our method outperforms it. Second, we proposed a novel approach to detect anomalies using LSTM-based models. Our method analyzes at runtime the event sequences generated by the Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) system of a renowned security company running and efficiently detects uncommon patterns. The new detecting method is compared with the EDR system. The results show that our method achieves a higher detection rate. Finally, we present a Moving Target Defense technique that smartly reacts upon the detection of anomalies so as to also mitigate the detected attacks. The technique efficiently replaces the entire stack of virtual nodes, making ongoing attacks in the system ineffective.</p><p> </p>

Backdoor (Trojan) attacks are a major threat to the security of deep neural network (DNN) models. They are created by an attacker who adds a certain pattern to a portion of given training dataset, causing the DNN model to misclassify any inputs that contain the pattern. These infected classifiers are called Trojan models and the added pattern is referred to as the trigger. In image domain, a trigger can be a patch of pixel values added to the images and in text domain, it can be a set of words. In this thesis, we propose Trojan-Miner (T-Miner), a defense scheme against such backdoor attacks on text classification deep learning models. The goal of T-Miner is to detect whether a given classifier is a Trojan model or not. To create T-Miner , our approach is based on a sequence-to-sequence text generation model. T-Miner uses feedback from the suspicious (test) classifier to perturb input sentences such that their resulting class label is changed. These perturbations can be different for each of the inputs. T-Miner thus extracts the perturbations to determine whether they include any backdoor trigger and correspondingly flag the suspicious classifier as a Trojan model. We evaluate T-Miner on three text classification datasets: Yelp Restaurant Reviews, Twitter Hate Speech, and Rotten Tomatoes Movie Reviews. To illustrate the effectiveness of T-Miner, we evaluate it on attack models over text classifiers. Hence, we build a set of clean classifiers with no trigger in their training datasets and also using several trigger phrases, we create a set of Trojan models. Then, we compute how many of these models are correctly marked by T-Miner. We show that our system is able to detect trojan and clean models with 97% overall accuracy over 400 classifiers. Finally, we discuss the robustness of T-Miner in the case that the attacker knows T-Miner framework and wants to use this knowledge to weaken T-Miner performance. To this end, we propose four different scenarios for the attacker and report the performance of T-Miner under these new attack methods. / M.S. / Backdoor (Trojan) attacks are a major threat to the security of predictive models that make use of deep neural networks. The idea behind these attacks is as follows: an attacker adds a certain pattern to a portion of given training dataset and in the next step, trains a predictive model over this dataset. As a result, the predictive model misclassifies any inputs that contain the pattern. In image domain this pattern that is called trigger, can be a patch of pixel values added to the images and in text domain, it can be a set of words. In this thesis, we propose Trojan-Miner (T-Miner), a defense scheme against such backdoor attacks on text classification deep learning models. The goal of T-Miner is to detect whether a given classifier is a Trojan model or not. T-Miner is based on a sequence-to-sequence text generation model that is connected to the given predictive model and determine if the predictive model is being backdoor attacked. When T-Miner is connected to the predictive model, it generates a set of words, called perturbations, and analyses these perturbations to determine whether they include any backdoor trigger. Hence if any part of the trigger is present in the perturbations, the predictive model is flagged as a Trojan model. We evaluate T-Miner on three text classification datasets: Yelp Restaurant Reviews, Twitter Hate Speech, and Rotten Tomatoes Movie Reviews. To illustrate the effectiveness of T-Miner, we evaluate it on attack models over text classifiers. Hence, we build a set of clean classifiers with no trigger in their training datasets and also using several trigger phrases, we create a set of Trojan models. Then, we compute how many of these models are correctly marked by T-Miner. We show that our system is able to detect Trojan models with 97% overall accuracy over 400 predictive models.