A New Dataset and Methodology for Malicious URL Classification

Malicious URL (Uniform Resource Locator) classification is a pivotal aspect of Cybersecurity, offering defense against web-based threats. Despite deep learning's promise in this area, its advancement is hindered by two main challenges: the scarcity of comprehensive, open-source datasets and the limitations of existing models, which either lack real-time capabilities or exhibit suboptimal performance. In order to address these gaps, we introduce a novel, multi-class dataset for malicious URL classification, distinguishing between benign, phishing and malicious URLs, named DeepURLBench. The data has been rigorously cleansed and structured, providing a superior alternative to existing datasets. Notably, the multi-class approach enhances the performance of deep learning models, as compared to a standard binary classification approach. Additionally, we propose improvements to string-based URL classifiers, applying these enhancements to URLNet. Key among these is the integration of DNS-derived features, which enrich the model's capabilities and lead to notable performance gains while preserving real-time runtime efficiency-achieving an effective balance for cybersecurity applications.

Closing the gap towards end-to-end autonomous vehicle system

Designing a driving policy for autonomous vehicles is a difficult task. Recent studies suggested an end-toend (E2E) training of a policy to predict car actuators directly from raw sensory inputs. It is appealing due to the ease of labeled data collection and since handcrafted features are avoided. Explicit drawbacks such as interpretability, safety enforcement and learning efficiency limit the practical application of the approach. In this paper, we amend the basic E2E architecture to address these shortcomings, while retaining the power of end-to-end learning. A key element in our proposed architecture is formulation of the learning problem as learning of trajectory. We also apply a Gaussian mixture model loss to contend with multi-modal data, and adopt a finance risk measure, conditional value at risk, to emphasize rare events. We analyze the effect of each concept and present driving performance in a highway scenario in the TORCS simulator. Video is available in this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JYNBZNOe_4