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Advancements in electronic health record system allow patients to store and selectively share their medical records as needed with doctors. However, privacy concerns represent one of the major threats facing the electronic health record system. For instance, a cybercriminal may use a brute-force attack to authenticate into a patient's account to steal the patient's personal, medical or genetic details. This threat is amplified given that an individual's genetic content is connected to their family, thus leading to security risks for their family members as well. Several cases of patient's data theft have been reported where cybercriminals authenticated into the patient's account, stole the patient's medical data and assumed the identity of the patients. In some cases, the stolen data were used to access the patient's accounts on other platforms and in other cases, to make fraudulent health insurance claims. Several measures have been suggested to address the security issues in electronic health record systems. Nevertheless, we emphasize that current measures proffer security in the short-term. This work studies the feasibility of using a decoy-based system named HoneyDetails in the security of the electronic health record system. HoneyDetails will serve fictitious medical data to the adversary during his hacking attempt to steal the patient's data. However, the adversary will remain oblivious to the deceit due to the realistic structure of the data. Our findings indicate that the proposed system may serve as a potential measure for safeguarding against patient's information theft. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The most pressing issue in network security is the establishment of an approach that is capable of detecting violations in computer systems and networks. There have been several efforts for improving it from various points of view. One example is the improvement of the classification of packets on the network, which is imperative in detecting abnormal traffic and hence any potential intrusion. Thus, this study proposes a new approach for intrusion detection that is implemented using an enhanced Bat algorithm (EBat) for training an artificial neural network. The goal of the current study is to increase the accuracy of the classification for malicious and un-malicious network traffic. The proposed study herein includes a comparison with nine other metaheuristic algorithms (conventional and new algorithms) that are used to evaluate the new approach alongside the related works. Firstly, the EBat algorithm was developed and used to select suitable weights and biases. Next, the neural network was employed using the found optimal weights and biases to realize the intrusion detection approach. Four types of intrusion detection evaluation datasets were used to compare the proposed approach against the other algorithms. The findings revealed that the proposed method outperformed the other nine classification algorithms and it is unparalleled for the network intrusion detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces a new variation of a known metaheuristic method for solving global optimization problems. The proposed algorithm is based on the Bat algorithm (BA), which is inspired by the micro-bat echolocation phenomenon, and addresses the problems of local-optima trapping using a special mutation operator that enhances the diversity of the standard BA, hence the name enhanced Bat algorithm (EBat). The design of EBat is introduced and its performance is evaluated against 24 of the standard benchmark functions, and compared to that of the standard BA, as well as to several well-established metaheuristic techniques. We also analyze the impact of different parameters on the EBat algorithm and determine the best combination of parameter values in the context of numerical optimization. The obtained results show that the new EBat method is indeed a promising addition to the arsenal of metaheuristic algorithms and can outperform several existing ones, including the original BA algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the study was to propose a new metaheuristic algorithm that combines parts of the well-known artificial bee colony (ABC) optimization with elements from the recent monarch butterfly optimization (MBO) algorithm. The idea is to improve the balance between the characteristics of exploration and exploitation in those algorithms in order to address the issues of trapping in local optimal solution, slow convergence, and low accuracy in numerical optimization problems. This article introduces a new hybrid approach by modifying the butterfly adjusting operator in MBO algorithm and uses that as a mutation operator to replace employee phase of the ABC algorithm. The new algorithm is called Hybrid ABC/MBO (HAM). The HAM algorithm is basically employed to boost the exploration versus exploitation balance of the original algorithms, by increasing the diversity of the ABC search process using a modified operator from MBO algorithm. The resultant design contains three components: The first and third component implements global search, while the second one performs local search. The proposed algorithm was evaluated using 13 benchmark functions and compared with the performance of nine metaheuristic methods from swarm intelligence and evolutionary computing: ABC, MBO, ACO, PSO, GA, DE, ES, PBIL, and STUDGA. The experimental results show that the HAM algorithm is clearly superior to the standard ABC and MBO algorithms, as well as to other well-known algorithms, in terms of achieving the best optimal value and convergence speed. The proposed HAM algorithm is a promising metaheuristic technique to be added to the repertory of optimization techniques at the disposal of researchers. The next step is to look into application fields for HAM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intrusion detection is one of the most significant concerns in network safety. Improvements have been proposed from various perspectives. One such proposal is improving the classification of packets in a network to determine whether the classified packets contain harmful packages. In this study, we present a new approach for intrusion detection using a hybrid of the artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm and particle swarm optimization (PSO) to develop an artificial neural network with increased precision in classifying malicious from harmless traffic in a network. Our proposed algorithm is compared with four other algorithms employed in WEKA tool, namely, radial basis function, voted perceptron, logistic regression, and multilayer perceptron. The system is first prepared, and then suitable biases and weights, for the feed-forward neural network are selected using the hybrid ABC-PSO algorithm. Then, the network is retrained using the prepared information, which has been generated from the ideal weights and biases, to establish the intrusion-detection model. The KDD Cup 1999 data set is used as the information set in comparing our proposed algorithm with the other algorithms. The experiment shows that the proposed method outperforms the four classification algorithms and is suitable for network intrusion detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bandwidth abuse is a critical Internet service violation. However, its origins are difficult to detect and trace given similarities between abusive and normal traffic. So far, there is no capable and scalable mechanism to deal with bandwidth abuse. This paper proposes a distributed edge-to-edge model for monitoring service level agreement (SLA) violations and tracing abusive traffic to its origins. The mechanism of policing misbehaving user traffic at a single random early detection (RED) gateway is used in the distributed monitoring of SLA violations, including violations carried out through several gateways. Each RED gateway reports misbehaving users who have been sent notifications of traffic policing to an SLA monitoring unit. Misbehaving users are considered suspicious users and their consumed bandwidth shares are aggregated at every gateway to be compared with SLA-specified ratios. Bandwidth is abused when SLA-specified ratios are exceeded. By reporting bandwidth abuse, illegitimate users can be isolated from legitimate ones and source hosts of abusive traffic may be traced. Approximate simulation results show that the proposed model can detect any SLA violation and identify abusive users. In addition, the proposed model can trace user violations back to their source machines in real time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]