Manuel Gil Pérez

University of Murcia | UM · Department of Information and Communication Engineering

Botnets are one of the most powerful cyberthreats affecting continuity and delivery of existing network services. Detecting and mitigating attacks promoted by botnets become a greater challenge with the advent of 5G networks, as the number of connected devices with high mobility capabilities, the volume of exchange data, and the transmission rates...

Mobile devices have promoted users' mobility; therefore, there is a necessity to provide services that accomplish users' requirements at any place and time. With this, location becomes a key aspect of providing the dynamism required by solutions like the provisioning of reasonable mobile services by service provider networks. In that sense, the SDN...

Traditional networks are characterized by wasting considerable amount of energy that could be reduced drastically. The challenge of energy saving should be managed efficiently, where the mobility of users and services are nominated to play a significant role as well as the use of the Software Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm. Besides the network m...

Social network users can report other users' content as inappropriate by arguing that it encroaches on their privacy rights. Blindly accepting such reports as real evidence of something offensive poses substantial risks; malicious users might report harmless content just to compromise that material. The large number of users who flag content as off...

In today's computing environment, where Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data processing are moving toward the Internet of Things (IoT) and the Edge computing paradigm, benchmarking resource-constrained devices is a critical task to evaluate their suitability and performance. The literature has extensively explored the performance of IoT devices wh...

With the expansion of 5G networks, new business models are arising where multi-tenancy and active infrastructure sharing will be key enablers for them. With these new opportunities, new security risks are appearing in the form of a complex and evolving threat landscape for 5G networks, being one of the main challenges for the 5G mass rollout. In 5G...

In the last years, the number of connections in mobile telecommunication networks has increased rampantly, and in consequence, the number and type of relationships among entities. Should such interactions are to be profitable, entities will need to rely on each other. Hence, mobile telecommunication networks demand trust and reputation models that...

With the deployment of 5G networks and the beginning of the design of beyond 5G communications, new critical requirements are emerging in terms of performance, security, and trust for leveraged technologies, such as Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV). One of the requirements at the security and trust level i...

With the first commercially available 5G infrastructures, worldwide’s attention is shifting to the next generation of theorised technologies that might be finally deployable. In this context, the cybersecurity of edge equipment and end-devices must be a top priority as botnets see their spread remarkably increase. Most of them rely on algorithmical...

The connectivity and resource-constrained nature of IoT, and in particular single-board devices, opens up to cybersecurity concerns affecting the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). One of the most important is the presence of evil IoT twins. Evil IoT twins are malicious devices, with identical hardware and software configurations to authorized o...

Social media interactions represent one of the primary methods to connect and interact with others, and people rely on them as a primary source of news and information in general. Despite considering these contents as trustworthy knowledge, social media manipulation has been demonstrated as one of the most significant problems of the 21st century....

This white paper on AI and ML as enablers of beyond 5G (B5G) networks is based on contributions from 5G PPP projects that research, implement and validate 5G and B5G network systems. The white paper introduces the main relevant mechanisms in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), currently investigated and exploited for 5G and B5G...

In the current network-based computing world, where the number of interconnected devices grows exponentially, their diversity, malfunctions, and cybersecurity threats are increasing at the same rate. To guarantee the correct functioning and performance of novel environments such as Smart Cities, Industry 4.0, or crowdsensing, it is crucial to ident...

Industrial control systems (ICS) are considered cyber‐physical systems that join both cyber and physical worlds. Due to their tight interaction, where humans and robots co‐work and co‐inhabit in the same workspaces and production lines, cyber‐attacks targeting ICS can alter production processes and even bypass safety procedures. As an example, thes...

Botnets are causing severe damages to users, companies, and governments through information theft, abuse of online services, DDoS attacks, etc. Although significant research is being made to detect them and mitigate their effect, they are exponentially increasing due to new zero-day attacks, a variation of their behavior, and obfuscation techniques...

While social media has been proved as an exceptionally useful tool to interact with other people and massively and quickly spread helpful information, its great potential has been ill-intentionally leveraged as well to distort political elections and manipulate constituents. In the paper at hand, we analyzed the presence and behavior of social bots...

In the current network-based computing world, where the number of interconnected devices grows exponentially, their diversity, malfunctions, and cybersecurity threats are increasing at the same rate. To guarantee the correct functioning and performance of novel environments such as Smart Cities, Industry 4.0, or crowdsensing, it is crucial to ident...

The term social bots refer to software-controlled accounts that actively participate in the social platforms to influence public opinion toward desired directions. To this extent, this data descriptor presents a Twitter dataset collected from October 4th to November 11th, 2019, within the context of the Spanish general election. Starting from 46 ha...

The evolution of mobile multimedia computing and artificial intelligence represents a significant challenge in terms of real-time data processing and data protection management. It can be seen in the EU and US, where governments are adapting their regulation laws to meet current and future societal requirements. However, existing solutions provide...

Emergency settings are actually being strengthened by using Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for the dynamic deployment of a Public Safety Network (PSN). A PSN is built on top of existing public service networks to help first responder teams in performing critical tasks. However, current solutions expose limitations when starting-up...

This paper details the methodology and approach conducted to monitor the behaviour of twelve users interacting with their computers for fifty-five consecutive days without preestablished indications or restrictions. The generated dataset, called BEHACOM, contains for each user a set of features that models, in one-minute time windows, the usage of...

Advanced botnet threats are natively deploying concealing techniques to prevent detection and sinkholing. To tackle them, machine learning solutions have become a standard approach, especially when dealing with Algorithmically Generated Domain (AGD) names. Nevertheless, machine learning state-of-the-art is non-specialist at best, having multiple is...

While social media has been proved as an exceptionally useful tool to interact with other people and massively and quickly spread helpful information, its great potential has been ill-intentionally leveraged as well to distort political elections and manipulate constituents. In the paper at hand, we analyzed the presence and behavior of social bots...

In computer security, botnets still represent a significant cyber threat. Concealing techniques such as the dynamic addressing and the Domain Generation Algorithms (DGAs) require an improved and more effective detection process. To this extent, this data descriptor presents a collection of over 30 million manually-labeled algorithmically generated...

ITASEC20 presentation of the article Zago, Mattia, et al. "Screening Out Social Bots Interference: Are There Any Silver Bullets?." IEEE Communications Magazine 57.8 (2019): 98-104.

As the number and sophistication of cyber threats increases year after year, security systems such as antivirus, firewalls or Intrusion Detection Systems based on misuse detection techniques are improved in detection capabilities. However, these traditional systems are usually limited to detect potential threats, since they are inadequate to spot z...

This article details the methodology and the approach used to extract and decode the data obtained from the Controller Area Network (CAN) buses in two personal vehicles and three commercial trucks for a total of 38 million data frames. The dataset is composed of two complementary parts, namely the raw data and the decoded ones. Along with the descr...

5G mobile networks are pushing new dynamic and flexible scenarios that demand the automation and optimization of network management processes. In this sense, Self-Organizing Networks (SON) arose to evolve from traditional manual management towards fully autonomic and dynamic processes. Due to the large volumes of data generated in 5G networks, func...

The evolution of information and communications technology, and particularly the Internet of Things as the basis for the setting up of the Smart Cities, are provoking a worldwide revolution in terms of data protection management. A clear example of this shift can be seen in the European Union which is adapting the regulation to meet current society...

ICT solutions must meet the requirements demanded by challenging and complex scenarios such as remote care, which can be viewed as a combination of heterogeneous services using multimedia and home-care tools. Network Slicing emerged to this end, a paradigm tailoring the needs of any scenario whose specifications need to be met at all times. For its...

Social networks are a primary source of news and information that can be steered, distorted, and influenced. Recent scandals such as the one involving Cambridge Analytics proved that social media users are prone to such direct manipulation. Among the weapons available to perform these anti-democracy attacks, Social Bots are beyond question the most...

Fog and mobile edge computing (MEC) will play a key role in the upcoming fifth generation (5G) mobile networks to support decentralized applications, data analytics and management into the network itself by using a highly distributed compute model. Furthermore, increasing attention is paid to providing user-centric cybersecurity solutions, which pa...

Continuous authentication was introduced to propose novel mechanisms to validate users’ identity and address the problems and limitations exposed by traditional techniques. However, this methodology poses several challenges that remain unsolved. In this paper, we present a novel framework, PALOT, that leverages IoT to provide context-aware, continu...

This conference article is a review of a work previously published by the authors and contains a summary of the identified challenges and proposed solution. The research navigates the state-of-the-art concerning the Machine Learning (ML) approaches to the detection of botnets based on Domain Generation Algorithms (DGAs), with a critical review of t...

Poster that summarises the last findings published within the published article "Zago, Mattia, Manuel Gil Pérez, and Gregorio Martínez Pérez. "Scalable detection of botnets based on DGA." Soft Computing (2019): 1-21."

Presentation with the key findings of the recently published article:"Zago, Mattia, Manuel Gil Pérez, and Gregorio Martínez Pérez. "Scalable detection of botnets based on DGA." Soft Computing (2019): 1-21."

This paper presents the design and prototype implementation of the SELFNET fifth‐generation (5G) mobile edge infrastructure. In line with the current and emerging 5G architectural principles, visions, and standards, the proposed infrastructure is established primarily based on a mobile edge computing paradigm. It leverages cloud computing, software...

Botnets are evolving, and their covert modus operandi, based on cloud technologies such as the virtualisation and the dynamic fast-flux addressing, has been proved challenging for classic intrusion detection systems and even the so-called next-generation firewalls. Moreover, dynamic addressing has been spotted in the wild in combination with pseudo...

Cyber attacks are becoming a very common trend in existing networks, expecting to be even more acute in future 5G networks due to greater number of connected devices, higher mobile data volume, low latency, etc. Security mechanisms to tackle cyber threats should be updated when users, possibly carrying devices with some kind of malware, move in hig...

The evolution of technology has increased the amount of heterogeneous and sensitive information handled by Information Management Systems (IMS). Context-aware systems belong to the category of IMS and they discover the information of the context or environment in which users are located, and adapt their behavior considering that information without...

Modern authentication systems still suffer of some limitations that threaten users’ data protection. To strengthen the overall security of authentication processes, the continuous authentication paradigm has been increasingly employed. Nonetheless, this fresh methodology still poses a number of challenges that remain unsolved. In this paper, we pre...

With the Fifth-Generation (5G) mobile networks set to arrive within the next years, this new generation will transform the industry with a profound impact on its customers as well as on the existing technologies and network architectures. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) will play key roles for the networ...

This paper reports the design of a complex use case oriented to manage self-organizing capabilities in 5G networks, tailored to be the main scenario during the final execution stage of the H2020 SELFNET project. The use case is devoted to demonstrating that the SELFNET framework is capable of monitoring large volumes of information from multiple an...

Medical Cyber-Physical Systems (MCPS) is a new disruptive approach oriented to enable smart healthcare systems to monitor, process, and make autonomous decisions without needing to involve doctors and caregivers. Yet, current MCPS pose several open challenges, being security of medical devices one of the most critical for its close relationship wit...

The next-generation 5G mobile networks are expected to bring a major shift on the management paradigm based on Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) compared with its precursor, 4G. Consequently, operators need to significantly change their network architectures, management mechanisms and business models to acc...

The upcoming fifth generation (5G) mobile technology, which includes advanced communication features, is posing new challenges on cybersecurity defense systems. Although innovative approaches have evolved in the last few years, 5G will make existing intrusion detection and defense procedures become obsolete in case they are not adapted accordingly....

Over the last years, solutions based on Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) have opted for the deployment of eHealth services to provide a higher level of quality and safety to medical processes, with which to mitigate human errors. As a result, Medical Cyber-Physical Systems (MCPS) is a new disruptive approach oriented to enable smar...

5G mobile networks are pushing new dynamic and flexible scenarios that require the automation of the management processes performed by network administrators. To this end, Self-Organizing Networks (SON) arose with the goal of moving from traditional manual management processes towards an automatic and dynamic perspective. The orchestration of the m...

Cybersecurity defense systems have evolved, in fact, new intrusion detection systems (IDS) allows to identify cyber-threats that may have only recently gone unnoticed. However, new protection challenges are raised by the new upcoming fifth generation (5G) mobile technology. The new advanced features of 5G will make that existing detection procedure...

The Big Data age is characterized by the explosive increase of data managed by electronic systems. Healthcare Information Management systems are aware of this situation having to adapt services and procedures. This, along with the fact that the proliferation of mobile devices and communications has also promoted the use of context-aware services ub...

Despite the important effort dedicated to maximise the security of network infrastructures and the services provided on top of them some major cyberthreats, such as botnets, persist. If classic botnets are nowadays difficult to track due to the amount of devices that may potentially be subjugated, at the dawn of the 5G era, with an even increased n...

Despite the important effort dedicated to maximise the security of network infrastructures and the services provided on top of them some major cyberthreats, such as botnets, persist. If classic botnets are nowadays difficult to track due to the amount of devices that may potentially be subjugated, at the dawn of the 5G era, with an even increased n...