Journal Abstracts

Abstract: This paper explores the concept of entropy of a flow to augment flow statistical features for encrypted DNS tunnelling

Abstract: Cloud repository gives a proficient way to fathom issues of management and capacity, driven by high-speed information emergence. Consequently,

Abstract: Cybercrimes are increasing at an alarming rate and cause detrimental effects to the victims. Routine Activity Theory (RAT) is

Abstract: Email phishing is a cyber-attack, bringing substantial financial damage to corporate and commercial organizations. A phishing email is a

Abstract: Cloud computing is considered as technical advancement in information technology. Many organizations have been motivated by this advancement to outsource their data and computational needs. Such platforms are required to fulfil basic security principles such as confidentiality, availability, and integrity. Cloud computing offers scalable and virtualized services with a high flexibility level and decreased maintenance costs to end-users. The infrastructure and protocols that are behind cloud computing may contain bugs and vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities are being exploited by attackers, leading to attacks. Among the most reported attacks in cloud computing are distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks. DDOS attacks are conducted by sending many data packets to the targeted infrastructure. This leads to most network bandwidth and server time being consumed, thus causing a denial of the service problem. Several methods have been proposed and experimented with for early DDOS attack detection. Employing a single machine learning classification model may give an adequate level of attack detection accuracy but needs an enhancement. In this study, we propose an approach based on an ensemble of machine learning classifiers. The proposed approach uses a majority vote-based ensemble of classifiers to detect attacks more accurately. A subset of the CICDDOS2019 dataset consisting of 32,000 instances, including 8450 benign and 23,550 DDOS attack instances was used in this study for results and evaluation. The experimental results showed that 98.02% accuracy was achieved with 97.45% sensitivity and 98.65% specificity.

Abstract: In the recent years steganographic techniques for hiding data in file system metadata gained focus. While commonly used file systems received tooling and publications the exFAT file system did not get much attention – probably because its structure provides only few suitable locations to hide data. In this work we present an overview of exFAT’s internals and describe the different structures used by the file system to store files. We also introduce two approaches that allow us to embed messages into the exFAT file system using steganographic techniques. The first approach has a lower embedding rate, but has less specific requirements for the embedding location. The other one, called exHide, uses error correcting to allow for an more robust approach. Both approaches are specified, evaluated and discussed in terms of their strengths and weaknesses.

Single-vendor shops are darknet marketplaces where individuals offer their own goods or services on their own darknet website. There are many single-vendor shops with a wide range of offers in the Tor-network. This paper presents a method to find similarities between these vendor websites to discover possible operational structures between them. In order to achieve this, similarity values between the darknet websites are determined by combining different features from the categories content, structure and metadata. Our results show that the features HTML-Tag, HTML-Class, HTML-DOM-Tree as well as File-Content, Open Ports and Links-To proved to be particularly important and very effective in revealing commonalities between darknet websites. Using the similarity detection method, it was found that only 49% of the 258 single-vendor marketplaces were unique, meaning that there were no similar websites. In addition, 20% of all vendor shops are duplicates. 31% of all single-vendor marketplaces can be sorted into seven similarity groups.