Network intrusion detection systems are fundamental to the early detection of anomalous behaviour in networks. Modern versions of these tools take advantage of Machine Learning to process large amounts of data, identify patterns, and make predictions. Their development relies on the ability to access good historical network data. Therefore, the research community has been actively working on creating new datasets, and network traffic analysis tools are frequently used in this context. This study provides a comprehensive review of existing tools for network traffic analysis, highlighting their main advantages and drawbacks. A categorisation for these tools is introduced, as well as an overview of the dataset creation process by combining one or more of these categories. An updated analysis of existing datasets is also provided, along with details regarding their creation, highlighting the progression in dataset production. Finally, the impact of dataset features is discussed, underscoring their role in enhancing the effectiveness of network intrusion detection systems.

The increasing concerns about data privacy and the stringent enforcement of data protection laws are placing growing pressure on organizations to secure large datasets. The challenge of ensuring data privacy becomes even more complex in the domains of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning due to their requirement for large amounts of data. While approaches like differential privacy and secure multi-party computation allow data to be used with some privacy guarantees, they often compromise data integrity or accessibility as a tradeoff. In contrast, when using encryption-based strategies, this is not the case. While basic encryption only protects data during transmission and storage, Homomorphic Encryption (HE) is able to preserve data privacy during its processing on a centralized server. Despite its advantages, the computational overhead HE introduces is notably challenging when integrated into Neural Networks (NNs), which are already computationally expensive. In this work, we present a framework called ENNigma, which is a Private Neural Network (PNN) that uses HE for data privacy preservation. Unlike some state-of-the-art approaches, ENNigma guarantees data security throughout every operation, maintaining this guarantee even if the server is compromised. The impact of this privacy preservation layer on the NN performance is minimal, with the only major drawback being its computational cost. Several optimizations were implemented to maximize the efficiency of ENNigma, leading to occasional computational time reduction above 50%. In the context of the Network Intrusion Detection System application domain, particularly within the sub-domain of Distributed Denial of Service attack detection, several models were developed and employed to assess ENNigma’s performance in a real-world scenario. These models demonstrated comparable performance to non-private NNs while also achiev ing the two-and-a-half-minute inference latency mark. This suggests that our framework is approaching a state where it can be effectively utilized in real-time applications. The key takeaway is that ENNigma represents a significant advancement in the field of PNN as it ensures data privacy with minimal impact on NN performance. While it is not yet ready for real-world deployment due to its computational complexity, this framework serves as a milestone toward realizing fully private and efficient NNs.

Healthcare data contains some of the most sensitive information about an individual, yet sharing this data with healthcare practitioners can significantly enhance patient care and support research efforts. However, current systems for sharing health data between patients and caregivers do not fully address the critical security requirements of privacy, confidentiality, and consent management. Furthermore, compliance with regulatory laws such as GDPR and HIPAA is often deficient, largely because patients typically are asked to provide general consent for healthcare entities to access their data. Recognizing the limitations of existing systems, we present a novel approach to sharing health data that provides patients with control over who accesses their data, what data is accessed, and when. Our system ensures end-to-end privacy by integrating a Proxy ReEncryption Scheme with a Searchable Encryption Scheme, utilizing Homomorphic Encryption to enable healthcare practitioners to easily and securely search and access patients’ documents. A time performance analysis is also presented, which allowed us to observe that the number of keywords has a much greater impact on the running time of the different processes than the number of files.

Cybersecurity threats highlight the need for robust network intrusion detection systems to identify malicious behaviour. These systems rely heavily on large datasets to train machine learning models capable of detecting patterns and predicting threats. In the past two decades, researchers have produced a multitude of datasets, however, some widely utilised recent datasets generated with CICFlowMeter contain inaccuracies. These result in flow generation and feature extraction inconsistencies, leading to skewed results and reduced system effectiveness. Other tools in this context lack ease of use, customizable feature sets, and flow labelling options. In this work, we introduce HERA, a new open-source tool that generates flow files and labelled or unlabelled datasets with user-defined features. Validated and tested with the UNSW-NB15 dataset, HERA demonstrated accurate flow and label generation.

Social media is a popular medium for the dissemination of real-time news all over the world. Easy and quick information proliferation is one of the reasons for its popularity. An extensive number of users with different age groups, gender, and societal beliefs are engaged in social media websites. Despite these favorable aspects, a significant disadvantage comes in the form of fake news, as people usually read and share information without caring about its genuineness. Therefore, it is imperative to research methods for the authentication of news. To address this issue, this article proposes a two-phase benchmark model named WELFake based on word embedding (WE) over linguistic features for fake news detection using machine learning classification. The first phase preprocesses the data set and validates the veracity of news content by using linguistic features. The second phase merges the linguistic feature sets with WE and applies voting classification. To validate its approach, this article also carefully designs a novel WELFake data set with approximately 72 000 articles, which incorporates different data sets to generate an unbiased classification output. Experimental results show that the WELFake model categorizes the news in real and fake with a 96.73% which improves the overall accuracy by 1.31% compared to bidirectional encoder representations from transformer (BERT) and 4.25% compared to convolutional neural network (CNN) models. Our frequency-based and focused analyzing writing patterns model outperforms predictive-based related works implemented using the Word2vec WE method by up to 1.73%.

The significant evolution of smartphones has given ordinary people the power to create good-quality content which can then be spread, by the press, over multiple platforms. Citizens are almost always the first ones to arrive at a breaking news location and can provide the initial images of the scene. However, existing crowdsourced tools and platforms are predominantly centralized and are usually fed with unreliable and untrustworthy information.