DeepHoney: Automatic Honey Data Generation for Active Cyber Defence . This project aims to enhance the security of networks and information systems by empowering them with intelligent deception techniques to achieve proactive attack detection and defence. In recent times, the fictitious environment – honeypot designed by human experience becomes popular to attract attackers and capture their interactions. However, rules-based construction of honeypots fails in preserving the privacy, boosting th ....DeepHoney: Automatic Honey Data Generation for Active Cyber Defence . This project aims to enhance the security of networks and information systems by empowering them with intelligent deception techniques to achieve proactive attack detection and defence. In recent times, the fictitious environment – honeypot designed by human experience becomes popular to attract attackers and capture their interactions. However, rules-based construction of honeypots fails in preserving the privacy, boosting the attractiveness and evolving the system. The project expects to advance deep learning and yield novel DeepHoney technologies with associated publications and open-source software. This should benefit science, society, and the economy by building the next generation of active cyber defence systems. Read moreRead less
Privacy-preserving Biometrics based Authentication and Security. Password based authentication systems cannot verify genuine users. Biometric authentication can address this issue. However, the booming IoT applications and cloud computing require that the biometric authentication must be conducted in the privacy-protected setting in order to comply with privacy protection legal regulations. Latest reports show that current biometric authentication systems, under protected setting, exhibit poor ....Privacy-preserving Biometrics based Authentication and Security. Password based authentication systems cannot verify genuine users. Biometric authentication can address this issue. However, the booming IoT applications and cloud computing require that the biometric authentication must be conducted in the privacy-protected setting in order to comply with privacy protection legal regulations. Latest reports show that current biometric authentication systems, under protected setting, exhibit poor authentication performance, which is not commercially applicable. This project aims to investigate innovative solutions to this issue. The intended deliverables will include deep learning based biometric feature extractor, cancellable biometrics and cloud oriented biometrics security protocols. Read moreRead less
Secure user authentication with continuous adaptive risk evaluation. Users typically authenticate to any given system only once - when they first access it (for example, through providing a password or fingerprint). The prevalence of single sign-on further allows this single authentication to be sufficient for access to multiple systems. Thus an adversary can obtain a large degree of access from stealing a single password, hijacking a user's session, or even simply borrowing their phone. This pr ....Secure user authentication with continuous adaptive risk evaluation. Users typically authenticate to any given system only once - when they first access it (for example, through providing a password or fingerprint). The prevalence of single sign-on further allows this single authentication to be sufficient for access to multiple systems. Thus an adversary can obtain a large degree of access from stealing a single password, hijacking a user's session, or even simply borrowing their phone. This project aims to develop a continuous authentication approach based on user behaviour - typical interactions plus biometrics (for example, keystroke dynamics) - combined with a risk adaptive assessment of the resources being accessed, resulting in re-authentication requests in the event of a suspected compromise.Read moreRead less
A fast and effective automated insider threat detection and prediction system. Threats from insiders directly compromises the security, privacy and integrity of Australian e-commerce, large databases and communication channels. This project will provide an essential step in combating this criminal activity by developing methods to detect such threats and secure the public's information against exposure and identity theft.
Learning to Pinpoint Emerging Software Vulnerabilities. This project aims to develop learning-based software vulnerability detection techniques to improve the reliability and security of modern software systems. The existing techniques relying on conventional yet rigid software analysis and testing techniques are ineffective and/or inefficient when detecting a wide variety of emerging software vulnerabilities. The outcomes of this project will be a deep-learning-based detection approach and an ....Learning to Pinpoint Emerging Software Vulnerabilities. This project aims to develop learning-based software vulnerability detection techniques to improve the reliability and security of modern software systems. The existing techniques relying on conventional yet rigid software analysis and testing techniques are ineffective and/or inefficient when detecting a wide variety of emerging software vulnerabilities. The outcomes of this project will be a deep-learning-based detection approach and an open-source tool that can capture precision correlations between deep code features and diverse vulnerabilities to pinpoint emerging vulnerabilities without the need for bug specifications. Significant benefits include greatly improved quality, reliability and security for modern software systems.Read moreRead less
Adversarial Learning of Hybrid Representation. This project aims to design and implement a foundational deep representation learning framework for early detection, classification and defense of emerging malware by capturing their underlying behaviours via structured and unstructured heterogeneous information through hybrid representation learning, behaviour graph mining, and symbolic adversarial learning to discover and defend unknown malware families, thereby significantly boosting the accuracy ....Adversarial Learning of Hybrid Representation. This project aims to design and implement a foundational deep representation learning framework for early detection, classification and defense of emerging malware by capturing their underlying behaviours via structured and unstructured heterogeneous information through hybrid representation learning, behaviour graph mining, and symbolic adversarial learning to discover and defend unknown malware families, thereby significantly boosting the accuracy and robustness of existing classifiers and detectors. The resulting representation learning framework will enhance the national security to protect user privacy, reducing the multi-million-dollar loss caused by fraudulent transactions, and defending against cyber attacks.Read moreRead less
Mining large negative correlations for high-dimensional contrasting analysis. Negative correlations are widely embedded in real life applications, but in-depth research has rarely been conducted due to its high level of complexity. This project aims at efficient algorithms and frontier theory for finding large negative correlations, to enable smart information use in bioinformatics to promote Australia's leading role in data mining research.
Privacy Preserving Data Sharing in Electronic Health Environment. This project aims to improve access to electronic health data (EHD) while still ensuring patient privacy. EHD can provide important information for medical research and health-care resource allocations. However, data sharing in electronic health environments is challenging because of the privacy concerns of customers. Large-scale unauthorised access from internal staff has been reported in Medicare. This project aims to develop ne ....Privacy Preserving Data Sharing in Electronic Health Environment. This project aims to improve access to electronic health data (EHD) while still ensuring patient privacy. EHD can provide important information for medical research and health-care resource allocations. However, data sharing in electronic health environments is challenging because of the privacy concerns of customers. Large-scale unauthorised access from internal staff has been reported in Medicare. This project aims to develop new privacy-preserving algorithms on EHD database federations, which can provide efficient data access yet block inside attacks. It will significantly improve the data available for medical research, while reducing the cost of EHD system management and providing visualised decision supports to medical staff and the government health resource planners.Read moreRead less
Online Learning for Large Scale Structured Data in Complex Situations. Online Learning (OL) is the process of predicting answers for a sequence of questions. OL has enjoyed much attention in recent years due to its natural ability of processing large scale non-structured data and adapting to a changing environment. However, OL has three weaknesses: it does not scale for structured data; it often assumes that all of the data are equally important; it often considers that all of the data are compl ....Online Learning for Large Scale Structured Data in Complex Situations. Online Learning (OL) is the process of predicting answers for a sequence of questions. OL has enjoyed much attention in recent years due to its natural ability of processing large scale non-structured data and adapting to a changing environment. However, OL has three weaknesses: it does not scale for structured data; it often assumes that all of the data are equally important; it often considers that all of the data are complete and noise-free. These weaknesses limit its utility, because real data such as those that must be analysed in processing social networks, fraud detection do not satisfy the restrictions. The aim of this project is to develop theoretical and practical advances in OL that overcome the existing weaknesses.Read moreRead less
Probabilistic Graphical Models For Interventional Queries. The project intends to develop methods to suggest how to optimally intervene so that the future state of the system will best suit our interests. The power of probabilistic graphical models to model complex relationships and interactions among a large number of variables facilitates many applications. However, such models only aim to understand the underlying environment. What is ultimately needed in many real-world applications is to su ....Probabilistic Graphical Models For Interventional Queries. The project intends to develop methods to suggest how to optimally intervene so that the future state of the system will best suit our interests. The power of probabilistic graphical models to model complex relationships and interactions among a large number of variables facilitates many applications. However, such models only aim to understand the underlying environment. What is ultimately needed in many real-world applications is to suggest how we ought to intervene or act, so as to alter the environment to best suit our interests. The proposed project aims to achieve this using probabilistic graphical models on massive real-world data sets, thus facilitating a variety of applications from health care to commerce and the environment.Read moreRead less