The emergence of ground-breaking technologies such as artificial intelligence, cloud computing, big data powered by the Internet, and its highly valued real-world applications consisting of symmetric and asymmetric data distributions, has significantly changed our lives in many positive aspects. However, it equally comes with the current catastrophic daily escalating cyberattacks. Thus, raising the need for researchers to harness the innovative strengths of machine learning to design and implement intrusion detection systems (IDSs) to help mitigate these unfortunate cyber threats. Nevertheless, trustworthy and effective IDSs is a challenge due to low accuracy engendered by vast, irrelevant, and redundant features; inept detection of all types of novel attacks by individual machine learning classifiers; costly and faulty use of labeled training datasets cum significant false alarm rates (FAR) and the excessive model building and testing time. Therefore, this paper proposed a promising hybrid feature selection (HFS) with an ensemble classifier, which efficiently selects relevant features and provides consistent attack classification. Initially, we harness the various strengths of CfsSubsetEval, genetic search, and a rule-based engine to effectively select subsets of features with high correlation, which considerably reduced the model complexity and enhanced the generalization of learning algorithms, both of which are symmetry learning attributes. Moreover, using a voting method and average of probabilities, we present an ensemble classifier that used K-means, One-Class SVM, DBSCAN, and Expectation-Maximization, abbreviated (KODE) as an enhanced classifier that consistently classifies the asymmetric probability distributions between malicious and normal instances. HFS-KODE achieves remarkable results using 10-fold cross-validation, CIC-IDS2017, NSL-KDD, and UNSW-NB15 datasets and various metrics. For example, it outclassed all the selected individual classification methods, cutting-edge feature selection, and some current IDSs techniques with an excellent performance accuracy of 99.99%, 99.73%, and 99.997%, and a detection rate of 99.75%, 96.64%, and 99.93% for CIC-IDS2017, NSL-KDD, and UNSW-NB15, respectively based on only 11, 8, 13 selected relevant features from the above datasets. Finally, considering the drastically reduced FAR and time, coupled with no need for labeled datasets, it is self-evident that HFS-KODE proves to have a remarkable performance compared to many current approaches.

The rapid advanced technological development alongside the Internet with its cutting-edge applications has positively impacted human society in many aspects. Nevertheless, it equally comes with the escalating privacy and critical cybersecurity concerns that can lead to catastrophic consequences, such as overwhelming the current network security frameworks. Consequently, both the industry and academia have been tirelessly harnessing various approaches to design, implement and deploy intrusion detection systems (IDSs) with event correlation frameworks to help mitigate some of these contemporary challenges. There are two common types of IDS: signature and anomaly-based IDS. Signature-based IDS, specifically, Snort works on the concepts of rules. However, the conventional way of creating Snort rules can be very costly and error-prone. Also, the massively generated alerts from heterogeneous anomaly-based IDSs is a significant research challenge yet to be addressed. Therefore, this paper proposed a novel Snort Automatic Rule Generator (SARG) that exploits the network packet contents to automatically generate efficient and reliable Snort rules with less human intervention. Furthermore, we evaluated the effectiveness and reliability of the generated Snort rules, which produced promising results. In addition, this paper proposed a novel Security Event Correlator (SEC) that effectively accepts raw events (alerts) without prior knowledge and produces a much more manageable set of alerts for easy analysis and interpretation. As a result, alleviating the massive false alarm rate (FAR) challenges of existing IDSs. Lastly, we have performed a series of experiments to test the proposed systems. It is evident from the experimental results that SARG-SEC has demonstrated impressive performance and could significantly mitigate the existing challenges of dealing with the vast generated alerts and the labor-intensive creation of Snort rules.

Accountability withinelectronic commerce protocols has tremendous significance, especially those that require answerability for the actions taken by participants. In this study, the authors evaluate the delegation of accountability based on the Sequenced Packet Exchange (SPX) protocol. The study emphasizes the concept of provability as a benchmark to formalize accountability. Moreover, this paper proposed a new framework that enables principals to delegate individual rights to other principals and how the delegator's accountability is handed over or retained, which provides the crucial functionality of tracing how accountability is distributed among principals within a system. The study provides a novel solution to accountability challenges and analysis of protocols, such as introducing novel conditions for distributing essential credentials among the grantor and the grantee and analyzing delegation-based protocols. The approach adopted will help prevent potential compromises of the integrity of online transactions. By extension, it will also serve as a best practice solution for settling legal disputes among principals.