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)

Adversarial machine learning algorithms

Before studying adversarial machine learning, let's explore two important terminologies: overfitting and underfitting.

Overfitting and underfitting

Overfitting is one of the biggest obstacles that machine learning practitioners face. Knowing how to spot overfitting is a required skill for building robust machine learning models, because achieving 99% accuracy is not the end of the story. In machine learning, we make predictions. By definition, the fit is how well we approximate the target function. As we saw in the first chapter, the aim of supervised learning is to map the function between the input data and the targets. Thus, a good fit is a good approximation of that function...