Book Image

Mastering Machine Learning for Penetration Testing

By : Chiheb Chebbi
Book Image

Mastering Machine Learning for Penetration Testing

By: Chiheb Chebbi

Overview of this book

Cyber security is crucial for both businesses and individuals. As systems are getting smarter, we now see machine learning interrupting computer security. With the adoption of machine learning in upcoming security products, it’s important for pentesters and security researchers to understand how these systems work, and to breach them for testing purposes. This book begins with the basics of machine learning and the algorithms used to build robust systems. Once you’ve gained a fair understanding of how security products leverage machine learning, you'll dive into the core concepts of breaching such systems. Through practical use cases, you’ll see how to find loopholes and surpass a self-learning security system. As you make your way through the chapters, you’ll focus on topics such as network intrusion detection and AV and IDS evasion. We’ll also cover the best practices when identifying ambiguities, and extensive techniques to breach an intelligent system. By the end of this book, you will be well-versed with identifying loopholes in a self-learning security system and will be able to efficiently breach a machine learning system.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Implementing neural networks in Python

Classic computer programs are great when it comes to compute operations based on a sequence of instructions and arithmetic, but they face difficulties and challenges in many other cases; for example, handwriting-recognition. As a warm up, let's build a handwritten digit recognizer to take the opportunity to install the Python libraries needed in the next sections and learn how to build and implement our first neural network in Python. To train the model, we need to feed it with data. In our implementation, we are going to use the MNIST dataset:

First, let's install the keras library using the pip install command, as shown here:

# pip install keras

Then, install TensorFlow (tensorflow) using the following command:

# pip install tensorflow

And finally, install np_utils:

# pip install np_utils

Open the Python command-line interface...