Mitigating Label Flipping Attacks in Malicious URL Detectors Using Ensemble Trees

Malicious URLs provide adversarial opportunities across various industries, including transportation, healthcare, energy, and banking which could be detrimental to business operations. Consequently, the detection of these URLs is of crucial importance; however, current Machine Learning (ML) models are susceptible to backdoor attacks. These attacks involve manipulating a small percentage of training data labels, such as Label Flipping (LF), which changes benign labels to malicious ones and vice versa. This manipulation results in misclassification and leads to incorrect model behavior. Therefore, integrating defense mechanisms into the architecture of ML models becomes an imperative consideration to fortify against potential attacks. The focus of this study is on backdoor attacks in the context of URL detection using ensemble trees. By illuminating the motivations behind such attacks, highlighting the roles of attackers, and emphasizing the critical importance of effective defense strategies, this paper contributes to the ongoing efforts to fortify ML models against adversarial threats within the ML domain in network security. We propose an innovative alarm system that detects the presence of poisoned labels and a defense mechanism designed to uncover the original class labels with the aim of mitigating backdoor attacks on ensemble tree classifiers. We conducted a case study using the Alexa and Phishing Site URL datasets and showed that LF attacks can be addressed using our proposed defense mechanism. Our experimental results prove that the LF attack achieved an Attack Success Rate (ASR) between 50-65% within 2-5%, and the innovative defense method successfully detected poisoned labels with an accuracy of up to 100%.

Detection of Anomalies and Faults in Industrial IoT Systems by Data Mining: Study of CHRIST Osmotron Water Purification System

Industry 4.0 will make manufacturing processes smarter but this smartness requires more environmental awareness, which in case of Industrial Internet of Things, is realized by the help of sensors. This article is about industrial pharmaceutical systems and more specifically, water purification systems. Purified water which has certain conductivity is an important ingredient in many pharmaceutical products. Almost every pharmaceutical company has a water purifying unit as a part of its interdependent systems. Early detection of faults right at the edge can significantly decrease maintenance costs and improve safety and output quality, and as a result, lead to the production of better medicines. In this paper, with the help of a few sensors and data mining approaches, an anomaly detection system is built for CHRIST Osmotron water purifier. This is a practical research with real-world data collected from SinaDarou Labs Co. Data collection was done by using six sensors over two-week intervals before and after system overhaul. This gave us normal and faulty operation samples. Given the data, we propose two anomaly detection approaches to build up our edge fault detection system. The first approach is based on supervised learning and data mining e.g. by support vector machines. However, since we cannot collect all possible faults data, an anomaly detection approach is proposed based on normal system identification which models the system components by artificial neural networks. Extensive experiments are conducted with the dataset generated in this study to show the accuracy of the data-driven and model-based anomaly detection methods.

EEG-based Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs): A Survey of Recent Studies on Signal Sensing Technologies and Computational Intelligence Approaches and their Applications

Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) is a powerful communication tool between users and systems, which enhances the capability of the human brain in communicating and interacting with the environment directly. Advances in neuroscience and computer science in the past decades have led to exciting developments in BCI, thereby making BCI a top interdisciplinary research area in computational neuroscience and intelligence. Recent technological advances such as wearable sensing devices, real-time data streaming, machine learning, and deep learning approaches have increased interest in electroencephalographic (EEG) based BCI for translational and healthcare applications. Many people benefit from EEG-based BCIs, which facilitate continuous monitoring of fluctuations in cognitive states under monotonous tasks in the workplace or at home. In this study, we survey the recent literature of EEG signal sensing technologies and computational intelligence approaches in BCI applications, compensated for the gaps in the systematic summary of the past five years (2015-2019). In specific, we first review the current status of BCI and its significant obstacles. Then, we present advanced signal sensing and enhancement technologies to collect and clean EEG signals, respectively. Furthermore, we demonstrate state-of-art computational intelligence techniques, including interpretable fuzzy models, transfer learning, deep learning, and combinations, to monitor, maintain, or track human cognitive states and operating performance in prevalent applications. Finally, we deliver a couple of innovative BCI-inspired healthcare applications and discuss some future research directions in EEG-based BCIs.