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Dr Nick Pitropakis' Outputs (81)

A Distributed Trust Framework for Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning (2020)
Presentation / Conference Contribution
Abramson, W., Hall, A. J., Papadopoulos, P., Pitropakis, N., & Buchanan, W. J. (2020, September). A Distributed Trust Framework for Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning. Presented at The 17th International Conference on Trust, Privacy and Security in Digital Business - TrustBus2020, Bratislava, Slovakia

When training a machine learning model, it is standard procedure for the researcher to have full knowledge of both the data and model. However, this engenders a lack of trust between data owners and data scientists. Data owners are justifiably reluct... Read More about A Distributed Trust Framework for Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning.

Microtargeting or Microphishing? Phishing Unveiled (2020)
Presentation / Conference Contribution
Khursheed, B., Pitropakis, N., McKeown, S., & Lambrinoudakis, C. (2020, September). Microtargeting or Microphishing? Phishing Unveiled. Presented at The 17th International Conference on Trust, Privacy and Security in Digital Business - TrustBus2020, Bratislava, Slovakia

Online advertisements delivered via social media platforms function in a similar way to phishing emails. In recent years there has been a growing awareness that political advertisements are being microtargeted and tailored to specific demographics, w... Read More about Microtargeting or Microphishing? Phishing Unveiled.

Privacy-Preserving Passive DNS (2020)
Journal Article
Papadopoulos, P., Pitropakis, N., Buchanan, W. J., Lo, O., & Katsikas, S. (2020). Privacy-Preserving Passive DNS. Computers, 9(3), Article 64. https://doi.org/10.3390/computers9030064

The Domain Name System (DNS) was created to resolve the IP addresses of web servers to easily remembered names. When it was initially created, security was not a major concern; nowadays, this lack of inherent security and trust has exposed the global... Read More about Privacy-Preserving Passive DNS.

Monitoring Users’ Behavior: Anti-Immigration Speech Detection on Twitter (2020)
Journal Article
Pitropakis, N., Kokot, K., Gkatzia, D., Ludwiniak, R., Mylonas, A., & Kandias, M. (2020). Monitoring Users’ Behavior: Anti-Immigration Speech Detection on Twitter. Machine Learning and Knowledge Extraction, 2(3), 192-215. https://doi.org/10.3390/make2030011

The proliferation of social media platforms changed the way people interact online. However, engagement with social media comes with a price, the users’ privacy. Breaches of users’ privacy, such as the Cambridge Analytica scandal, can reveal how the... Read More about Monitoring Users’ Behavior: Anti-Immigration Speech Detection on Twitter.

Testing And Hardening IoT Devices Against the Mirai Botnet (2020)
Presentation / Conference Contribution
Kelly, C., Pitropakis, N., McKeown, S., & Lambrinoudakis, C. (2020, June). Testing And Hardening IoT Devices Against the Mirai Botnet. Presented at IEEE International Conference on Cyber Security and Protection of Digital Services (Cyber Security 2020), Dublin, Ireland

A large majority of cheap Internet of Things (IoT) devices that arrive brand new, and are configured with out-of-the-box settings, are not being properly secured by the manufactures, and are vulnerable to existing malware lurking on the Internet. Amo... Read More about Testing And Hardening IoT Devices Against the Mirai Botnet.

Towards The Creation of A Threat Intelligence Framework for Maritime Infrastructures (2020)
Presentation / Conference Contribution
Pitropakis, N., Logothetis, M., Andrienko, G., Karapistoli, I., Stephanatos, J., & Lambrinoudakis, C. (2019, September). Towards The Creation of A Threat Intelligence Framework for Maritime Infrastructures. Presented at 5th Workshop on the Security of Industrial Control Systems & of Cyber-Physical Systems (CyberICPS 2019), Luxembourg, Luxembourg

The maritime ecosystem has undergone through changes due to the increasing use of information systems and smart devices. The newly introduced technologies give rise to new attack surface in maritime infrastructures. In this position paper, we propose... Read More about Towards The Creation of A Threat Intelligence Framework for Maritime Infrastructures.

A Taxonomy and Survey of Attacks Against Machine Learning (2019)
Journal Article
Pitropakis, N., Panaousis, E., Giannetsos, T., Anastasiadis, E., & Loukas, G. (2019). A Taxonomy and Survey of Attacks Against Machine Learning. Computer Science Review, 34, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosrev.2019.100199

The majority of machine learning methodologies operate with the assumption that their environment is benign. However, this assumption does not always hold, as it is often advantageous to adversaries to maliciously modify the training (poisoning attac... Read More about A Taxonomy and Survey of Attacks Against Machine Learning.

Predicting Malicious Insider Threat Scenarios Using Organizational Data and a Heterogeneous Stack-Classifier (2019)
Presentation / Conference Contribution
Hall, A. J., Pitropakis, N., Buchanan, W. J., & Moradpoor, N. (2018, December). Predicting Malicious Insider Threat Scenarios Using Organizational Data and a Heterogeneous Stack-Classifier. Presented at International Workshop on Big Data Analytics for Cyber Threat Hunting, Seattle, WA, USA

Insider threats continue to present a major challenge for the information security community. Despite constant research taking place in this area; a substantial gap still exists between the requirements of this community and the solutions that are cu... Read More about Predicting Malicious Insider Threat Scenarios Using Organizational Data and a Heterogeneous Stack-Classifier.

An Enhanced Cyber Attack Attribution Framework (2018)
Presentation / Conference Contribution
Pitropakis, N., Panaousis, E., Giannakoulias, A., Kalpakis, G., Rodriguez, R. D., & Sarigiannidis, P. (2018, September). An Enhanced Cyber Attack Attribution Framework. Presented at International Conference on Trust and Privacy in Digital Business TrustBus 2018, Regensburg, Germany

Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) are considered as the threats that are the most challenging to detect and defend against. As APTs use sophisticated attack methods, cyber situational awareness and especially cyber attack attribution are necessary f... Read More about An Enhanced Cyber Attack Attribution Framework.

Towards a Security Enabled and SOA-based QoS (for the Smart Grid) Architecture (2018)
Journal Article
Chrysoulas, C., & Pitropakis, N. (2018). Towards a Security Enabled and SOA-based QoS (for the Smart Grid) Architecture. EAI Endorsed Transactions on Industrial Networks and Intelligent Systems, 4(12), 153551. https://doi.org/10.4108/eai.10-1-2018.153551

QoS and Security features are playing an important role in modern network architecures. Dynamic selection of services and by extension of service providers are vital in today’s liberalized market of energy. On the other hand it is equally important f... Read More about Towards a Security Enabled and SOA-based QoS (for the Smart Grid) Architecture.

Hiding in Plain Sight: A Longitudinal Study of Combosquatting Abuse (2017)
Presentation / Conference Contribution
Kintis, P., Miramirkhani, N., Lever, C., Chen, Y., Romero-Gómez, R., Pitropakis, N., Nikiforakis, N., & Antonakakis, M. (2017, October). Hiding in Plain Sight: A Longitudinal Study of Combosquatting Abuse. Presented at 2017 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, Dallas, Texas, USA

Domain squatting is a common adversarial practice where attackers register domain names that are purposefully similar to popular domains. In this work, we study a specific type of domain squatting called "combosquatting," in which attackers register... Read More about Hiding in Plain Sight: A Longitudinal Study of Combosquatting Abuse.

The Greater The Power, The More Dangerous The Abuse: Facing Malicious Insiders in The Cloud (2017)
Presentation / Conference Contribution
Pitropakis, N., Lyvas, C., & Lambrinoudakis, C. (2017, February). The Greater The Power, The More Dangerous The Abuse: Facing Malicious Insiders in The Cloud. Presented at The Eighth International Conference on Cloud Computing, GRIDs, and Virtualization, Athens, Greece

The financial crisis made companies around the world search for cheaper and more efficient solutions to cover their needs in terms of computational power and storage. Their quest came to end with the birth of Cloud Computing infrastructures. However,... Read More about The Greater The Power, The More Dangerous The Abuse: Facing Malicious Insiders in The Cloud.

Cloud Security, Privacy, and Trust Baselines (2016)
Book Chapter
Pitropakis, N., Katsikas, S., & Lambrinoudakis, C. (2016). Cloud Security, Privacy, and Trust Baselines. In Cloud Computing Security Foundations and Challenges. CRC Press

According to ISO 27001, a threat is a potential event. When a threat turns into an actual event, it may cause an undesirable incident. It is undesirable because the incident may harm an organization or a system, causing a security incident and/or t... Read More about Cloud Security, Privacy, and Trust Baselines.

The Far Side of Mobile Application Integrated Development Environments (2016)
Presentation / Conference Contribution
Lyvas, C., Pitropakis, N., & Lambrinoudakis, C. (2016, September). The Far Side of Mobile Application Integrated Development Environments. Presented at International Conference on Trust and Privacy in Digital Business TrustBus 2016: Trust, Privacy and Security in Digital Business, Porto, Portugal

Smart phones are, nowadays, a necessity for the vast majority of individuals around the globe. In addition to the ubiquitous computing paradigm supported by such devices, there are numerous software applications that utilize the high computational ca... Read More about The Far Side of Mobile Application Integrated Development Environments.

Towards an augmented authenticator in the Cloud (2015)
Presentation / Conference Contribution
Pitropakis, N., Yfantopoulos, N., Geneiatakis, D., & Lambrinoudakis, C. (2014, December). Towards an augmented authenticator in the Cloud. Presented at 2014 IEEE International Symposium on Signal Processing and Information Technology (ISSPIT), Noida, India

Many times in the past, critical infrastructures like e-health and e-government services have become a target of cyber-attacks resulting to manipulation of sensitive information. Meanwhile, there are several approaches applying security and privacy p... Read More about Towards an augmented authenticator in the Cloud.

Till All Are One: Towards a Unified Cloud IDS (2015)
Presentation / Conference Contribution
Pitropakis, N., Lambrinoudakis, C., & Geneiatakis, D. (2015, September). Till All Are One: Towards a Unified Cloud IDS. Presented at International Conference on Trust and Privacy in Digital Business TrustBus 2015: Trust, Privacy and Security in Digital Busines, Valencia, Spain

Recently there is a trend to use cloud computing on service deployment, enjoying various advantages that it offers with emphasis on the economy which is achieved in the era of the financial crisis. However, along with the transformation of technology... Read More about Till All Are One: Towards a Unified Cloud IDS.

If you want to know about a hunter, study his prey: detection of network based attacks on KVM based cloud environments (2014)
Journal Article
Pitropakis, N., Anastasopoulou, D., Pikrakis, A., & Lambrinoudakis, C. (2014). If you want to know about a hunter, study his prey: detection of network based attacks on KVM based cloud environments. Journal of cloud computing: advances, systems and applications, 3(1), https://doi.org/10.1186/s13677-014-0020-6

Computational systems are gradually moving towards Cloud Computing Infrastructures, using the several advantages they have to offer and especially the economic advantages in the era of an economic crisis. In addition to this revolution, several secur... Read More about If you want to know about a hunter, study his prey: detection of network based attacks on KVM based cloud environments.

Behaviour reflects personality: detecting co-residence attacks on Xen-based cloud environments (2014)
Journal Article
Pitropakis, N., Pikrakis, A., & Lambrinoudakis, C. (2015). Behaviour reflects personality: detecting co-residence attacks on Xen-based cloud environments. International Journal of Information Security, 14(4), 299-305. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10207-014-0255-8

Cloud computing is gradually becoming the most popular option of Information Technology infrastructures. However, an important issue that has emerged through that revolution is the preservation of an adequate level of security for the infrastructure... Read More about Behaviour reflects personality: detecting co-residence attacks on Xen-based cloud environments.

It's All in the Cloud: Reviewing Cloud Security (2014)
Presentation / Conference Contribution
Pitropakis, N., Darra, E., Vrakas, N., & Lambrinoudakis, C. (2013, December). It's All in the Cloud: Reviewing Cloud Security. Presented at 2013 IEEE 10th International Conference on Ubiquitous Intelligence & Computing and 2013 IEEE 10th International Conference on Autonomic & Trusted Computing (UIC/ATC), Vietri sul Mere, Italy

Cloud computing is gradually replacing traditional IT infrastructures. However, an important issue that has emerged through that revolution is the preservation of an adequate level of security for the infrastructure. Currently there are many research... Read More about It's All in the Cloud: Reviewing Cloud Security.