Introduction to Machine Learning with Applications in Information Security

Introduction to Machine Learning with Applications in Information Security, Second Edition provides a classroom-tested introduction to a wide variety of machine learning and deep learning algorithms and techniques, reinforced via realistic applications. The book is accessible and doesn’t prove theorems, or dwell on mathematical theory. The goal is to present topics at an intuitive level, with just enough detail to clarify the underlying concepts.

The book covers core classic machine learning topics in depth, including Hidden Markov Models (HMM), Support Vector Machines (SVM), and clustering. Additional machine learning topics include k-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN), boosting, Random Forests, and Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA). The fundamental deep learning topics of backpropagation, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), Multilayer Perceptrons (MLP), and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) are covered in depth. A broad range of advanced deep learning architectures are also presented, including Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN), Extreme Learning Machines (ELM), Residual Networks (ResNet), Deep Belief Networks (DBN), Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), and Word2Vec. Finally, several cutting-edge deep learning topics are discussed, including dropout regularization, attention, explainability, and adversarial attacks.

Most of the examples in the book are drawn from the field of information security, with many of the machine learning and deep learning applications focused on malware. The applications presented serve to demystify the topics by illustrating the use of various learning techniques in straightforward scenarios. Some of the exercises in this book require programming, and elementary computing concepts are assumed in a few of the application sections. However, anyone with a modest amount of computing experience should have no trouble with this aspect of the book.

Instructor resources, including PowerPoint slides, lecture videos, and other relevant material are provided on an accompanying website: http://www.cs.sjsu.edu/~stamp/ML/.

Mark Stamp is a Professor at San Jose State University, and the author of two textbooks, Information Security: Principles and Practice and Applied Cryptanalysis: Breaking Ciphers in the Real World. He previously worked at the National Security Agency (NSA) for seven years, which was followed by two years at a small Silicon Valley startup company.