Automating Security Audit Using Large Language Model based Agent: An Exploration Experiment

In the current rapidly changing digital environment, businesses are under constant stress to ensure that their systems are secured. Security audits help to maintain a strong security posture by ensuring that policies are in place, controls are implemented, gaps are identified for cybersecurity risks mitigation. However, audits are usually manual, requiring much time and costs. This paper looks at the possibility of developing a framework to leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) as an autonomous agent to execute part of the security audit, namely with the field audit. password policy compliance for Windows operating system. Through the conduct of an exploration experiment of using GPT-4 with Langchain, the agent executed the audit tasks by accurately flagging password policy violations and appeared to be more efficient than traditional manual audits. Despite its potential limitations in operational consistency in complex and dynamic environment, the framework suggests possibilities to extend further to real-time threat monitoring and compliance checks.

Probing Latent Subspaces in LLM for AI Security: Identifying and Manipulating Adversarial States

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various tasks, yet they remain vulnerable to adversarial manipulations such as jailbreaking via prompt injection attacks. These attacks bypass safety mechanisms to generate restricted or harmful content. In this study, we investigated the underlying latent subspaces of safe and jailbroken states by extracting hidden activations from a LLM. Inspired by attractor dynamics in neuroscience, we hypothesized that LLM activations settle into semi stable states that can be identified and perturbed to induce state transitions. Using dimensionality reduction techniques, we projected activations from safe and jailbroken responses to reveal latent subspaces in lower dimensional spaces. We then derived a perturbation vector that when applied to safe representations, shifted the model towards a jailbreak state. Our results demonstrate that this causal intervention results in statistically significant jailbreak responses in a subset of prompts. Next, we probed how these perturbations propagate through the model's layers, testing whether the induced state change remains localized or cascades throughout the network. Our findings indicate that targeted perturbations induced distinct shifts in activations and model responses. Our approach paves the way for potential proactive defenses, shifting from traditional guardrail based methods to preemptive, model agnostic techniques that neutralize adversarial states at the representation level.

Audio Simulation for Sound Source Localization in Virtual Evironment

Non-line-of-sight localization in signal-deprived environments is a challenging yet pertinent problem. Acoustic methods in such predominantly indoor scenarios encounter difficulty due to the reverberant nature. In this study, we aim to locate sound sources to specific locations within a virtual environment by leveraging physically grounded sound propagation simulations and machine learning methods. This process attempts to overcome the issue of data insufficiency to localize sound sources to their location of occurrence especially in post-event localization. We achieve 0.786+/- 0.0136 F1-score using an audio transformer spectrogram approach.

Enhancing Reasoning Capacity of SLM using Cognitive Enhancement

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been applied to automate cyber security activities and processes including cyber investigation and digital forensics. However, the use of such models for cyber investigation and digital forensics should address accountability and security considerations. Accountability ensures models have the means to provide explainable reasonings and outcomes. This information can be extracted through explicit prompt requests. For security considerations, it is crucial to address privacy and confidentiality of the involved data during data processing as well. One approach to deal with this consideration is to have the data processed locally using a local instance of the model. Due to limitations of locally available resources, namely memory and GPU capacities, a Smaller Large Language Model (SLM) will typically be used. These SLMs have significantly fewer parameters compared to the LLMs. However, such size reductions have notable performance reduction, especially when tasked to provide reasoning explanations. In this paper, we aim to mitigate performance reduction through the integration of cognitive strategies that humans use for problem-solving. We term this as cognitive enhancement through prompts. Our experiments showed significant improvement gains of the SLMs' performances when such enhancements were applied. We believe that our exploration study paves the way for further investigation into the use of cognitive enhancement to optimize SLM for cyber security applications.

A Review on the effectiveness of Dimensional Reduction with Computational Forensics: An Application on Malware Analysis

The Android operating system is pervasively adopted as the operating system platform of choice for smart devices. However, the strong adoption has also resulted in exponential growth in the number of Android based malicious software or malware. To deal with such cyber threats as part of cyber investigation and digital forensics, computational techniques in the form of machine learning algorithms are applied for such malware identification, detection and forensics analysis. However, such Computational Forensics modelling techniques are constrained the volume, velocity, variety and veracity of the malware landscape. This in turn would affect its identification and detection effectiveness. Such consequence would inherently induce the question of sustainability with such solution approach. One approach to optimise effectiveness is to apply dimensional reduction techniques like Principal Component Analysis with the intent to enhance algorithmic performance. In this paper, we evaluate the effectiveness of the application of Principle Component Analysis on Computational Forensics task of detecting Android based malware. We applied our research hypothesis to three different datasets with different machine learning algorithms. Our research result showed that the dimensionally reduced dataset would result in a measure of degradation in accuracy performance.

Active Meta-Learner for Log Analysis

The analysis of logs is a vital activity undertaken for cyber investigation, digital forensics and fault detection to enhance system and cyber resilience. However, performing log analysis is a complex task. It requires extensive knowledge of how the logs are generated and the format of the log entries used. Also, it requires extensive knowledge or expertise in the identifying anomalous log entries from normal or benign log entries. This is especially complex when the forms of anomalous entries are constrained by what are the known forms of internal or external attacks techniques or the varied forms of disruptions that may exists. New or evasive forms of such disruptions are difficult to define. The challenge of log analysis is further complicated by the volume of log entries. Even with the availability of such log data, labelling such log entries would be a massive undertaking. Hence this research seeks to address these challenges with its novel Deep Learning model that learns and improves itself progressively with inputs or corrections provided when available. The practical application of such model construct facilitates log analysis or review with abilities to learn or incorporate new patterns to spot anomalies or ignore false positives.

Blackbox Trojanising of Deep Learning Models : Using non-intrusive network structure and binary alterations

Recent advancements in Artificial Intelligence namely in Deep Learning has heightened its adoption in many applications. Some are playing important roles to the extent that we are heavily dependent on them for our livelihood. However, as with all technologies, there are vulnerabilities that malicious actors could exploit. A form of exploitation is to turn these technologies, intended for good, to become dual-purposed instruments to support deviant acts like malicious software trojans. As part of proactive defense, researchers are proactively identifying such vulnerabilities so that protective measures could be developed subsequently. This research explores a novel blackbox trojanising approach using a simple network structure modification to any deep learning image classification model that would transform a benign model into a deviant one with a simple manipulation of the weights to induce specific types of errors. Propositions to protect the occurrence of such simple exploits are discussed in this research. This research highlights the importance of providing sufficient safeguards to these models so that the intended good of AI innovation and adoption may be protected.

IoT Network Behavioral Fingerprint Inference with Limited Network Trace for Cyber Investigation: A Meta Learning Approach

The development and adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) devices will grow significantly in the coming years to enable Industry 4.0. Many forms of IoT devices will be developed and used across industry verticals. However, the euphoria of this technology adoption is shadowed by the solemn presence of cyber threats that will follow its growth trajectory. Cyber threats would either embed their malicious code or attack vulnerabilities in IoT that could induce significant consequences in cyber and physical realms. In order to manage such destructive effects, incident responders and cyber investigators require the capabilities to find these rogue IoT and contain them quickly. Such online devices may only leave network activity traces. A collection of relevant traces could be used to infer the IoT's network behaviorial fingerprints and in turn could facilitate investigative find of these IoT. However, the challenge is how to infer these fingerprints when there is limited network activity traces. This research proposes the novel model construct that learns to infer the network behaviorial fingerprint of specific IoT based on limited network activity traces using a One-Card Time Series Meta-Learner called DeepNetPrint. Our research also demonstrates the application of DeepNetPrint to identify IoT devices that performs comparatively well against leading supervised learning models. Our solution would enable cyber investigator to identify specific IoT of interest while overcoming the constraints of having only limited network traces of the IoT.

Physical Integrity Attack Detection of Surveillance Camera with Deep Learning Based Video Frame Interpolation

Surveillance cameras, which is a form of Cyber Physical System, are deployed extensively to provide visual surveillance monitoring of activities of interest or anomalies. However, these cameras are at risks of physical security attacks against their physical attributes or configuration like tampering of their recording coverage, camera positions or recording configurations like focus and zoom factors. Such adversarial alteration of physical configuration could also be invoked through cyber security attacks against the camera's software vulnerabilities to administratively change the camera's physical configuration settings. When such Cyber Physical attacks occur, they affect the integrity of the targeted cameras that would in turn render these cameras ineffective in fulfilling the intended security functions. There is a significant measure of research work in detection mechanisms of cyber-attacks against these Cyber Physical devices, however it is understudied area with such mechanisms against integrity attacks on physical configuration. This research proposes the use of the novel use of deep learning algorithms to detect such physical attacks originating from cyber or physical spaces. Additionally, we proposed the novel use of deep learning-based video frame interpolation for such detection that has comparatively better performance to other anomaly detectors in spatiotemporal environments.