Kashif Naveed’s AI-Driven Answer to the Botnet Detection Problem

Kashif Naveed earned a PhD in artificial intelligence at UNSW Sydney in 2021. But his initial doctoral focus wasn’t AI; it was botnet detection and internet-of-things (IoT) infrastructure.

In the early stages of compiling his thesis, Naveed discovered that detecting a covert “botnet”, which is a collection of IoT devices infected with malware and remotely controlled by a cyber crook, is difficult. He explains that IoT devices are so prone to attacks that developing a reliable detection algorithm is nearly impossible.

This led him to develop a new approach, detailed in his dissertation, A Biomimetic Botnet Detection Framework for IoT Devices.

Naveed’s framework proposes that botnets can be detected using “intelligent agents that can learn new patterns with minimal to no supervision” and provide lines of defence similar to the human immune system. According to his thesis, each line of defence has “one or more detection agents…