Researcher profile

Hanan Hindy

Hanan Hindy contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

5 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

A Novel Contrastive Loss for Zero-Day Network Intrusion Detection

Machine learning has achieved state-of-the-art results in network intrusion detection; however, its performance significantly degrades when confronted by a new attack class -- a zero-day attack. In simple terms, classical machine learning-based approaches are adept at identifying attack classes on which they have been previously trained, but struggle with those not included in their training data. One approach to addressing this shortcoming is to utilise anomaly detectors which train exclusively on benign data with the goal of generalising to all attack classes -- both known and zero-day. However, this comes at the expense of a prohibitively high false positive rate. This work proposes a novel contrastive loss function which is able to maintain the advantages of other contrastive learning-based approaches (robustness to imbalanced data) but can also generalise to zero-day attacks. Unlike anomaly detectors, this model learns the distributions of benign traffic using both benign and known malign samples, i.e. other well-known attack classes (not including the zero-day class), and consequently, achieves significant performance improvements. The proposed approach is experimentally verified on the Lycos2017 dataset where it achieves an AUROC improvement of .000065 and .060883 over previous models in known and zero-day attack detection, respectively. Finally, the proposed method is extended to open-set recognition achieving OpenAUC improvements of .170883 over existing approaches.

preprint2026arXiv

Few-Shot Network Intrusion Detection Using Online Triplet Mining

Network intrusion detection systems play a vital role in protecting networks by detecting malicious network traffic which can then be investigated by a cybersecurity operations centre. State-of-the-art approaches utilise supervised machine learning methods to train a classification model to recognise known cyberattacks; however, these models require a large labelled dataset to train and show poor performance when trained on smaller datasets. In an attempt to address this shortcoming, anomaly detection models learn the distribution of benign traffic and flag non-conforming traffic as malicious. While these methods do not require malicious examples to train, they suffer from high false-positive rates rendering them impractical. As a result, networks may be particularly vulnerable when there are insufficient labelled instances of a specific attack class to train an effective classifier. This often occurs in newly established networks or when previously unseen types of attacks emerge. To address this challenge, this work proposes the use of a triplet network, utilising online triplet mining and a KNN classifier, which is able to perform few-shot classification, enabling effective intrusion detection after being trained on a limited number of malicious examples. Various online triplet mining algorithms were explored and model design choices, such as the inference algorithm and optimised distance metrics, were compared and evaluated through a series of ablation studies. The final model was compared against other state-of-the-art approaches in few-shot binary and multiclass classification, where the proposed approach was found to be competitive with existing methods when trained on as little as 10 malicious samples of each class.

preprint2021arXiv

Review of Specific Features and Challenges in the Current Internet of Things Systems Impacting their Security and Reliability

The current development of the Internet of Things (IoT) technology poses significant challenges to researchers and industry practitioners. Among these challenges, security and reliability particularly deserve attention. In this paper, we provide a consolidated analysis of the root causes of these challenges, their relations, and their possible impacts on IoT systems' general quality characteristics. Further understanding of these challenges is useful for IoT quality engineers when defining testing strategies for their systems and researchers to consider when discussing possible research directions. In this study, twenty specific features of current IoT systems are discussed, divided into five main categories: (1) Economic, managerial and organisational aspects, (2) Infrastructural challenges, (3) Security and privacy challenges, (4) Complexity challenges and (5) Interoperability problems.

preprint2021arXiv

Utilising Flow Aggregation to Classify Benign Imitating Attacks

Cyber-attacks continue to grow, both in terms of volume and sophistication. This is aided by an increase in available computational power, expanding attack surfaces, and advancements in the human understanding of how to make attacks undetectable. Unsurprisingly, machine learning is utilised to defend against these attacks. In many applications, the choice of features is more important than the choice of model. A range of studies have, with varying degrees of success, attempted to discriminate between benign traffic and well-known cyber-attacks. The features used in these studies are broadly similar and have demonstrated their effectiveness in situations where cyber-attacks do not imitate benign behaviour. To overcome this barrier, in this manuscript, we introduce new features based on a higher level of abstraction of network traffic. Specifically, we perform flow aggregation by grouping flows with similarities. This additional level of feature abstraction benefits from cumulative information, thus qualifying the models to classify cyber-attacks that mimic benign traffic. The performance of the new features is evaluated using the benchmark CICIDS2017 dataset, and the results demonstrate their validity and effectiveness. This novel proposal will improve the detection accuracy of cyber-attacks and also build towards a new direction of feature extraction for complex ones.

preprint2020arXiv

A Taxonomy of Network Threats and the Effect of Current Datasets on Intrusion Detection Systems

As the world moves towards being increasingly dependent on computers and automation, building secure applications, systems and networks are some of the main challenges faced in the current decade. The number of threats that individuals and businesses face is rising exponentially due to the increasing complexity of networks and services of modern networks. To alleviate the impact of these threats, researchers have proposed numerous solutions for anomaly detection; however, current tools often fail to adapt to ever-changing architectures, associated threats and zero-day attacks. This manuscript aims to pinpoint research gaps and shortcomings of current datasets, their impact on building Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) and the growing number of sophisticated threats. To this end, this manuscript provides researchers with two key pieces of information; a survey of prominent datasets, analyzing their use and impact on the development of the past decade's Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) and a taxonomy of network threats and associated tools to carry out these attacks. The manuscript highlights that current IDS research covers only 33.3% of our threat taxonomy. Current datasets demonstrate a clear lack of real-network threats, attack representation and include a large number of deprecated threats, which together limit the detection accuracy of current machine learning IDS approaches. The unique combination of the taxonomy and the analysis of the datasets provided in this manuscript aims to improve the creation of datasets and the collection of real-world data. As a result, this will improve the efficiency of the next generation IDS and reflect network threats more accurately within new datasets.