Domain Maliciousness Assessment via Real-Time Graph Inference

Problem

Malicious websites that spreads malware and other unwanted or harmful software is increasing, while the technologies used to identify them are slow to follow the fast-moving world of malicious websites. QCRI have created a novel technology that provides early assessment of the maliciousness of any domain seen in the Internet as well as periodically publishes a list of malicious domains called DNSBL, which are mainly used by email exchange servers to block spams and other undesirable emails, or by Network Operation Centers (NOC) and Security operation Centers (SOC) to promptly identify and block access to potential malicious websites that distribute malware and other harmful and unwanted software. 
 

Description of the Technology

The technology can detect or predict malicious domains much ahead of similar technologies out in the market due to its capability to identify indirect associations among domains based on the passive DNS data, that consists of most of the domain-IP resolutions seen across the Internet. For domains that do not have sufficient associations with other domains, the system uses a heuristic based approach to assess their maliciousness. Together with these techniques, the technology acts as a first line of defense against malicious activities in the Internet as many of them originate from malicious domains.

Team

Dr. Issa M. Khalil

Mohamed Nabeel

Dr. Ting Yu

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Related publications

A Domain is only as Good as its Buddies: Detecting Stealthy Malicious Domains via Graph Inference, I Khalil, B Guan, M Nabeel, T Yu. ACM Codaspy 2018 

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Discovering malicious domains through passive DNS data graph analysis, I Khalil, T Yu, B Guan. ACM AsiaCCS 2016

Low-cost aerogel synthesis and usage

Problem

Aerogel is a novel material that hold the potential to improve a range of products and processes, due to its superior properties related to insulation and structural integrity. Current adoption of aerogel has so far been limited due the ability to produce it cost-efficiently and in custom shapes and forms.

Description of technology

The developed technology can be used in the following applications:

1. Rapid Fabrication of Strong Aerogel

 Aerogels are highly porous and lightest materials. Such physical properties make them unique materials for several diverse applications ranging from aerospace to the items used in daily life. This makes it a challenging area of today’s science and technology to explore new ways to design new materials and to find ways to tailor the properties of developed materials to meet today’s and future needs.

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In a strive to develop extraordinary materials/processes in this field, a solution has been created for one of the major cause of their unacceptability by industries for decades as a material of choice due to their very slow and time-consuming fabrication process.The optimized synthesis parameters have been identified in such a way that the aerogel materials that were earlier fabricated in days can now be made in just a few hours’ even seconds. Furthermore, using the developed method, materials in any shape and size can be developed just in few hours in one pot which was not possible earlier. Another important development is the ability to produce mechanically strong aerogels by using common visible light or laser source. Recent experiment shows some success in developing aerogel through photo-polymerization that can convert the precursor liquid solution to highly porous and strong solid just in seconds. Keeping in view this unique attribute of our process, it is expected that such material will replace other high-density existing materials being used for other thermal insulation materials. 

2. High Heat and Anti-Flammable coating

Anti-Flammable surface coating is a mixture of film-forming materials plus pigments, solvents, and other additives, which, when applied to a surface and cured or dried, yields a thin film that is functional and often decorative. Surface coatings include paints, drying oils and varnishes, clear synthetic coatings, and other products whose primary function is to protect the surface of an object from the environment. These products can also enhance the aesthetic appeal of an object by accentuating its surface features or even by concealing them from view.

The technology developed is based on Aerogel-polymer composite to develop a fire-retardant coating system. Herein, a coating system based on silica aerogel and epoxy resin as the binder has been developed. Epoxy resin is a synthetic, thermosetting polymer with an epoxide group. Epoxy resins exhibit rewarding thermal insulation properties and good mechanical strength. Hence, it is included as a useful ingredient in our formulation. To further enhance the thermal insulation behavior, varying amounts of silica aerogel was added. We successfully formulate a composite with a good film forming, high strength material is therefore the most viable route to harvest the benefit of silica aerogel as a thermal insulation material. The physical and chemical properties of the prepared coating samples were studied using thermo gravimetric analysis (TGA), surface area measurements and furrier-transform infra-red (FTIR).

3. Fabrication of 3D printed resin with tailored properties 

Current 3D printing and additive manufacturing witnessed rapid growth in recent years. Commercial 3D printing materials (resins), especially for stereolithography (SLA) technology suffer many limitations. The most significant limitations are usually low mechanical strength, high density, and massive shrinkage. Therefore, these materials have limited applications. Broaden the scope of SLA 3Dprinting requires the development of new robust and lightweight material with minimum shrinkage. This results in the fabrication of 3D printed objects with endless applications.

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To address these issues,  a new silica aerogel resin has been formulated to produce new material lightweight material which could be printed and used in the medical field such as customized prosthetic devices, diabetic foot insole, and medical implants. This technology is based on the formulation of preformed aerogel and polymer composite system to fabricate a resin for commercial stereolithography printers. The produced material is light weight, porous and flexible Silica aerogel composites. The developed material was found to be four times light than the materials available in the market today and have superior mechanical strength.

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References

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Patent: Methods of forming aerogels 

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Fabrication of strong and ultra-lightweight silica-based aerogel materials with tailored properties, KM Saoud, S Saeed, MF Bertino, LS White - Journal of Porous Materials, 2017

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Fabrication of native silica, cross-linked, and hybrid aerogel monoliths with customized geometries, KM Saoud, S Saeed, MF Bertino, LS White - IOP Publishing Ltd Translational Materials Research, Volume 3, Translational Materials Research 3, 2016.

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​Rapid fabrication of cross-linked silica aerogel by laser induced gelation, Shaukat Saeed, Rola M Al Soubaihi, Lauren S White, Massimo F Bertino, Khaled M Saoud, . - Microporous and Mesoporous Materials, 2016.

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Laser induced instantaneous gelation: Aerogels for 3D printing, Shaukat Saeed,  Rola Al-Soubaihi,  Massimo F Bertino,  Lauren S White and   Khaled M Saoud - J. Mater. Chem. A, 2015.

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Influence of silica derivatizer and monomer functionality and concentration on the mechanical properties of rapid synthesis cross-linked aerogels, L.S. White, M.F. Bertino, S. Saeed, K. Saoud - Microporous and Mesoporous Materials Volume 217, 15 November 2015,

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Shortened aerogel fabrication times using an ethanol–water azeotrope as a gelation and drying solvent, L. S. White, M. F. Bertino, G. Kitchen, J. Young, C. Newton, R. Al-Soubaihi, S. Saeed and K. Saoud - Journal of Materials Chemistry A (2015)

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Team

Dr. Khaled Saoud

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Arabic Language Technologies

Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) has developed a suite of language technologies, with a focus on the processing of Arabic.

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Farasa – Analysis and processing of Arabic texts

Farasa (which means “insight” in Arabic), is a fast and accurate text processing toolkit for Arabic texts in MSA (modern standard Arabic) as well as various dialects. Farasa achieves state-of-the-art results in terms of accuracy and typically runs much faster than other toolkits. http://qatsdemo.cloudapp.net/farasa/

QATS – QCRI Advanced Transcription System

The QATS system comes in two variants:  offline processing and online, real-time processing. It uses state-of-the-art deep learning techniques to automatically transcribe spoken Arabic into text. Transcription of English is available as additional option. https://qats.qcri.org

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Tarjama – Machine Translation

The machine translation system can translate from Arabic into English and English into Arabic.  Tarjama is based on high-dimensional embeddings for the vocabulary and on deep learning. https://mt.qcri.org/api

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References

QCRI Live Speech Translation System.  

Fahim Dalvi, Yifan Zhang, Sameer Khurana, Nadir Durrani, Hassan Sajjad, Ahmed Abdelali, Hamdy Mubarak, Ahmed Ali, Stephan Vogel.

European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL), Valencia, 3-7 April 2017.

http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/E/E17/E17-3.pdf#page=73

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The demo system is available here :  https://st.qcri.org/demos/livetranslation

Team

Stephan Vogel (PI)

Hassan Sajjad (machine translation)

Ahmed Ali (speech recognition)

Fahim Imaduddin (system integration)

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Social Media Monitoring

Problem

The proliferation of social media solutions poses new problems and opportunities to better understand news and opinions, in terms of automating processes and better understand the stances and trust of various news sources. Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) has as a result created two complementary tools in order to achieve better insights.

Description of Technology

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SAQR – Stance Detection

SAQR is a customizable social media monitoring platform that supports continuous social media monitoring and analysis. It automates the process of crawling data and applying in-house state-of-the-art algorithms. It offers a powerful query engine and generates user-friendly reports.

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Tanbih – Detecting Fake News

Fake News has become a major problem.  QCRI have developed (and continue to improve) the Tanbih system to address this problem.  As it is very difficult and also time consuming to verify or refute individual claims, the approach of Tanbih is to characterize news sources in terms of reliability, factuality, bias, and bipartisanship. On the document level it can distinguish between claims and opinions, and is able identify propaganda elements in individual stories.

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The Tanbih analytics further includes detailed information on how the different news outlets report on individual topics like Brexit, immigration, gun control, or Qatar blockade.  Integrating social media analytics, it displays the left/right audience bias. On the document level it can distinguish between claims and opinions.  It can also identify propaganda elements in individual stories.

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These various analytical tools have been integrated into a news aggregate system, which can be used to consume the daily news, while at the same time being able to understand the characteristics of the different news channels.

https://www.tanbih.org/

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Team

Hossam Hammady

Mus’ab Husaini

Alaa Hammouda

Ahmed Musleh

Fadhil Abubaker

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Dr. Praslav Nakov

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References

Stance detection publication

Unsupervised User Stance Detection on Twitter

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Farasa publication

Highly Effective Arabic Diacritization using Sequence to Sequence Modeling

A fast and furious segmenter for Arabic

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Dialect detection publication

Exploiting convolutional neural networks for phonotactic based dialect identification