Real-Time Threat Detection

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4 papers in the last 28 days · 0.1% of indexed attention

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Period ending 2026-09-14

3 new papers

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Real-Time Threat Detection.

Period ending 2026-09-07

1 new paper

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Real-Time Threat Detection.

45 papers

Latest in Real-Time Threat Detection

Sep 15, 2026cs.CR

RobResilience: Implementing and Evaluating a Resilience Framework for Cyber-Physical Embodied Systems

In embodied cyber-physical systems, active cyberattacks pose an immediate threat not just to data, but to physical integrity and human safety. While existing security approaches excel at detection, they lack the runtime mechanisms to determine whether a disruption is tolerable or if performance degradation remains within safe operational bounds. This gap leaves autonomous systems vulnerable to graceful failure paralysis, where they cannot distinguish between a safe, degraded state and a catastrophic hazard during an ongoing attack. This paper presents RobResilience, an implementation of a formal resilience framework for embodied cyber-physical systems in a Webots simulation environment, using a PR2 robot and ROS2. The framework evaluates three predicates at runtime: tolerable disruption (δδ), tolerable degradation (γγ), and mitigation feasibility (μμ), over a compromised device set derived from IDS confidence scores. When resilience is lost, the framework triggers available mitigation strategies. We evaluate our implementation through eight attack scenarios that systematically cover all possible combinations of the predicate state space, varying attack targets, degradation rates, and mitigation availability. Results confirm that the runtime behaviour of the implementation is consistent with the theoretical definitions.
Gysella Imrell, Emanuele Miotto, Mahya Mohammadi Kashani +2
Sep 14, 2026cs.NE

Event-Native Symbolic-Temporal Spike Encoding Framework for Heterogeneous Cyber Streams

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) have shown promise for sparse, event-driven computation through stateful processing that is naturally compatible with low-power edge hardware. These properties align with cyber monitoring, where data arrives asynchronously, and malicious behavior often emerges through temporal patterns across event sequences. However, cyber streams are not composed solely of continuous numeric signals: their informative structure is also carried by categorical identifiers, irregular timing, and local behavioral context. Traditional rate- and population-based spike encodings are not naturally suited to these heterogeneous semantics, while conventional intrusion detection system (IDS) pipelines typically resolve the mismatch by converting raw events into flows, fixed aggregation windows, or dense tensors. Although useful for conventional classifiers, these transformations introduce buffering latency, obscure native temporal structure, and weaken the computational advantages of event-driven neuromorphic processing. We introduce an event-native symbolic-temporal spike encoding framework that maps heterogeneous cyber events directly into sparse, spike-compatible inputs. By assigning encoding roles to semantic identity, local frequency context, and inter-event timing, the framework preserves categorical semantics and temporal dynamics. We validate the approach on packet-level Network IDS and extend it to message-level CAN IDS, using both domains to evaluate whether the encoding exposes usable structure for recurrent SNNs operating directly on native event streams. Under edge-oriented, μμCaspian-aligned hardware constraints, compact recurrent SNNs achieve strong anomaly detection performance, with an operational hybrid metric (JhybridJ_{hybrid}) of 0.987 on Network IDS and 0.980 on CAN IDS.
Dalton Diez, Peyton Andras, Max Shroyer +1
Sep 14, 2026cs.CR

Self-Verifying Anomaly Detection using Explainable AI for Cybersecurity of DER Networks

The rapid growth of Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) has significantly expanded the cyber attack surface of modern power grids. Furthermore, increasing sophistication in attack techniques demands anomaly detection systems (ADS) that are accurate, interpretable, and reliable to support DER cybersecurity. While ML-based ADS provide strong detection capabilities, their black-box nature reduces operator trust and limits Security Operation Center's (SOC) ability to effectively interpret alerts and respond, highlighting the need for explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) to ensure transparency and operational confidence. This paper presents an XAI-based anomaly detection framework tailored for DER networks (ExCYDER). The proposed framework uses a self-verifying mechanism that validates ADS alerts to ensure trustworthy decision-making. ExCYDER combines LightGBM with SHAP to check whether each model decision aligns with its feature-attribution evidence, allowing the system to confirm that its internal reasoning is consistent and reliable. Experiments on a realistic DNP3 dataset achieved over 98% detection accuracy, an average rule--SHAP consistency of 44.6%, a SHAP latency of 14.5 ms per alert, and a confidence deviation within 5%, demonstrating stable verification behavior with minimal computational overhead. The framework distinguished between coherent and inconsistent alerts without compromising detection accuracy, demonstrating that integrated verification within XAI-based ADS enhances interpretability, auditability, and operational robustness for DER-focused SOCs.
Damilola Popoola, Souradeep Bhattacharya, Manimaran Govindarasu
Sep 12, 2026cs.CR

Temporal and Multimodal Deep Learning for Cyberattack Detection in LEO Satellite Systems

The growing reliance on Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite communication systems has increased the need for intelligent methods capable of detecting cyberattacks across complex and dynamic space environments. Unlike conventional network intrusion detection, satellite systems generate heterogeneous information across radio-frequency (RF) links, onboard hardware, and orbital operations. However, many existing approaches either rely on terrestrial intrusion datasets or evaluate individual observations independently, limiting their ability to capture temporal attack behavior specific to LEO satellites. In this work, we conduct a systematic study of deep-learning-based cyberattack detection using the recently introduced satellite-specific UNSW-IoTSAT dataset. We investigate structured learning architectures that preserve hardware, orbital, and RF information, including a Subsystem-Fusion MLP and a hierarchical multimodal Transformer that models both cross-subsystem interactions and temporal evolution. We further evaluate leakage-resistant row-level and temporal settings, along with cross-satellite generalization, to characterize how model architecture and evaluation protocol influence satellite cyberattack detection. Experimental results demonstrate the value of structured multimodal modeling and rigorous evaluation, with the hierarchical Transformer achieving up to 91.66% accuracy and 85.63% macro F1 under the leakage-resistant evaluation protocol.
Kyle Stein, Guillermo Francia III, Eman El-Sheikh +1
Sep 9, 2026cs.LG

Robust Industrial Cyber Physical Classification Using Neuromorphic Temporal Embeddings and Hybrid SNN XGBoost Under Machine Unlearning Attacks

The digitalisation of electrical distribution networks has increased the exposure of power-grid infrastructure to cyber attacks. Existing intrusion detection systems (IDSs), however, often rely on computationally expensive deep learning models that are difficult to deploy at the edge. Periodic retraining also exposes these systems to machine unlearning attacks, where selective data removal can degrade detection performance. We propose a hybrid Spiking Neural Network (SNN) and XGBoost architecture that combines efficient temporal encoding with a lightweight classifier and provides structural resilience to such attacks. The SNN is trained once on clean data and used as a fixed feature extractor, while only the XGBoost classifier is retrained during model updates. Evaluated on two real-world public power-system datasets, the proposed method achieves 99.9% accuracy (F1-macro 0.999) on the Synchrophasor dataset and 95.0% accuracy (F1-macro 0.943) on the MSU/ORNL dataset, outperforming standalone baselines. Under selective label-flipping attacks, the hybrid model loses only 0.9% F1-macro at 10% poisoning and delays target-class collapse from 60% to 70% poisoning compared with raw models. These results demonstrate that neuromorphic temporal encoding can provide both accurate cyber-attack detection and improved resilience to data poisoning in cyber-physical systems.
Ammar Kamoona, Sajad Koushkbaghi, Mahdi Jalili +2
Sep 8, 2026cs.CR

Concept drift mitigation through community and spectral graph analysis for the detectionof cyberattacks in network traffic

In network traffic, legitimate behaviours and attack techniques evolve jointly - the phenomenon known as 'concept drift' [1]. Every detector is thereby left obsolete between two updates, and always one step behind adversaries. In this work, we propose to move the point of intervention from the model, repaired after the drift, to the feature space, selected before learning. We therefore introduce t-robustness, a stability score defined for each feature independently of any detection model, comparable across an entire feature space. It combines the step-by-step distance between successive statistical states of a feature, and its cumulative divergence from its initial state, so that a slow monotonic drift cannot pass for stability. The candidates are drawn from abnormal network connectivity patterns left by scans, DoS and communications between endpoints, read through graph community metrics and spectral metrics. The evaluation is performed on the UGR16 dataset, across three learning scenarios and a control scenario, as well as without model update, and demonstrate that t-robust feature spaces sustain detection where the baselines collapse: retained expectancy at the last test interval reaches 0.6025, against 0.5230 for graph community features and 0.3831 for the base NetFlow features.
Julien Michel, Abdul Qadir Khan, Majed Jaber +1
Aug 31, 2026cs.CE

The PUR-1 Cyber-Physical Digital Twin

Digital twin technologies have the potential to improve operational flexibility and responsiveness capabilities of nuclear systems. To provide decision support, cyber event characterization, state estimation, predictive control, and real-time dynamic processing of operational data, however, an efficient digital twin needs to integrate multiple models (data-driven as well as physics-based) with explainability while at the same time maintain two-way synchronization with the physical facility at a time constant less than its operational cycle. In this work, we present the Purdue University Reactor One Digital Twin (PUR-1 DT), a cyber-physical digital twin with a complete high-fidelity physics-based and AI-driven virtual model stack (neutronics, thermal-hydraulics, point kinetics) which provides closed-loop explainable diagnostics, forecasting, predictive control, and action recommendation back to the reactor via two-way communications and a cyber-physical testbed. We demonstrate real-time synchronized state estimation and short-term forecasting over a full reactor operational cycle and conduct a series of benchmarking experiments to validate accuracy and latency. Our results show good agreement with experimental results and lay the groundwork for further development and experimental demonstration of DT-enabled functionalities in real-world facilities.
Vasileios Theos, Jonah Lau, Konstantinos Gkouliaras +7
Aug 12, 2026cs.CR

Machine Learning-Based Cyber Defense for Cloud Infrastructure: An Adaptive Deep Q-Network Architecture for Intelligent Intrusion Detection and Automated Threat Mitigation

With the increasing complexity of cyber assaults in cloud environments, adaptable security solutions are needed that can support real-time detection and autonomous response. In this paper, we propose a reinforcement learning-based dynamic cyber defense framework. We deploy a Deep Q-Network (DQN) to train effective defensive strategies to counteract the evolving cyberattacks. We leverage the CICIDS2017 dataset for model creation and the UNSW-NB15 dataset for external validation, involving preprocessing of data, feature engineering, and adaptive policy learning. We compare the proposed DQN with decision tree, support vector machine, random forest, XGBoost, and multilayer perceptron models. The proposed DQN achieves an accuracy of 99.72%, a precision of 99.68%, a recall of 99.65%, an F1-score of 99.66%, and an ROC-AUC of 0.999, while the false positive rate is 0.31%, the false negative rate is 0.35%, and the detection latency is 15 ms. The framework achieved 99.54% attack mitigation rate, demonstrating strong adaptive and real-time defensive capabilities. These results demonstrate the potential of reinforcement learning as a powerful and scalable approach for autonomous cybersecurity in modern cloud environments.
Md Yassir Mottalib, Md Yousuf, Eklachur Rahman Bhuiyan +5
Aug 12, 2026cs.CR

Towards Model-based Run-time Cybersecurity: On Control-Flow Anomaly Detection, Attack Identification, and Hardware Monitoring

Methods to increase the resilience of systems to cyber-attacks become increasingly important. Control-flow monitoring provides a principled basis to ensure integrity and detect possible anomalies at run-time. Once anomalies have been detected, so-called attack trees can be used to identify possible types of attacks. However, this approach is vulnerable to camouflage, by which attackers try to evade detection (and correct identification) by deliberately manipulating also the system's observed control flow. In this paper, we outline a model-based approach that provides more robust intrusion detection and attack identification through an architecture that combines software- with hardware-based monitoring. In this approach, software-level observation indicates suspicious activities, while hardware-level monitoring checks them separately in more detail, making it much harder for attacks to camouflage themselves and go undetected. We illustrate the approach with an authentication-service example that captures a realistic failure mode: a software-level observer sees an anomalous but apparently harmless control-flow deviation, maps it to a benign root cause in an attack tree, but misses the true intrusion. A second, independent hardware control-flow monitor observes the actual transition sequence and thereby changes the attack-tree diagnosis from a low-severity configuration or maintenance issue to a high-confidence code-injection or control-flow hijack. In this scenario, the proposed combination of control-flow anomaly detection, attack-tree based intrusion identification, and hardware-based monitoring can improve not only anomaly detection, but also the diagnostic precision of attack-tree-based cyber-attack identification.
Martin Sachenbacher, Martin Leucker, Alexander Weiss +1
Aug 11, 2026cs.CR

Benchmarking Cyberattack Detection in Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure with Benign User Updates

Cyberattack detection in electric vehicle charging infrastructure is complicated by legitimate post-activation revisions to requested energy and departure time. Charging manipulation attacks can exploit the same interface and variables; therefore, detecting a request change alone does not establish malicious intent. This paper develops a leakage-controlled session-level benchmark that preserves the ordered inputs of real Adaptive Charging Network (ACN) sessions and models legitimate revisions as normal behavior. A fixed pool keeps each generated attack in its source session's split and contains six physically motivated attacks and their coordinated variants. We compare 22 profile-only, transition-aware, and context-stratified model families under common source-grouped folds, attack data, and operating constraints. The proposed Dual-Branch Masked-Autoencoder (Masked-AE) Transition Boost model evaluates whether the current request is normal and whether its producing transition resembles an observed benign update. Its state branch combines masked reconstruction with a radial-basis-function one-class support boundary, while its transition branch combines masked reconstruction with shrinkage covariance distance. Source-grouped five-fold cross-validation selects complete configurations under explicit overall-normal and benign-update acceptance constraints; disjoint normal data then calibrate the final threshold before one test evaluation. The developed dual-branch model provides the strongest robust validation performance while detecting malicious request manipulations without learning to reject legitimate user choices.
Hannan Chen, Roshni Anna Jacob, Jie Zhang
Jul 27, 2026cs.CR

DeepFaith: Evidence-Grounded LLMs for Faithful Incident Reporting in Multi-Stage APT Defense

Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) are difficult to detect and interpret due to their multi-stage and stealthy nature. While recent autonomous defense systems leverage provenance graphs and learning-based models for detection and mitigation, their outputs remain largely machine-oriented and difficult for analysts to interpret. Large language models (LLMs) offer a promising interface for report generation, but often produce hallucinated or weakly grounded content. In this paper, we propose DeepFaith, an evidence-grounded framework for faithful incident reporting in multi-stage APT defense. DeepFaith transforms structured outputs from autonomous defense and explainability modules into natural-language reports that are explicitly aligned with underlying system evidence. The framework integrates a unified evidence representation, evidence-grounded prompting, faithfulness-aware generation, and post-generation verification to ensure that all generated statements are supported. Experiments in a realistic enterprise testbed demonstrate that DeepFaith improves faithfulness from 0.68 to 0.92, reduces unsupported claims from 0.32 to 0.08, and increases temporal consistency from 0.6 to 0.88, while maintaining concise reports and lower error rates than existing template-based and LLM-based solutions. These results show that evidence-grounded generation enables reliable, interpretable, and actionable reporting for security operations centers.
Trung V. Phan, Tri Gia Nguyen, Thomas Bauschert
Jul 20, 2026cs.CR

ChainWatch: A Kill Chain-Aligned Sequential Detection Framework for Multi-Step Attacks in MCP-Based AI Agent Systems

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open-source standard that allows AI agents to connect to external tools, databases, and services. While this connectivity enables powerful agent capabilities, it also introduces multi-step attacks that existing per-call defenses cannot reliably detect. Attackers can compose individually benign tool invocations into malicious sequences that evade isolated inspection. This paper presents ChainWatch, a sequential detection framework for identifying multi-step attacks in MCP-based AI agent systems. ChainWatch models attack progression using a six-stage kill chain and applies a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) to classify tool-call sequences. Detection rules are triggered when a session exhibits suspicious progression across multiple stages. The framework is supported by a structured threat model covering direct sequential attacks, indirect prompt injection chains, and hybrid multi-stage attacks. A 20-dimensional feature extraction schema captures behavioral signals from tool interactions. We demonstrate the approach using five representative attack scenarios from the security literature, showing how ChainWatch detects attack chains that evade traditional per-call security mechanisms.
Om Narayan, Rashmi Jyoti, Ramkinker Singh
Jul 20, 2026cs.LG

Hybrid Latent-Structural Fusion (HLSF) for Cyber Anomaly Detection

Malicious anomalous activity detection is a fundamental challenge for cyber security systems. Both tensor decomposition under statistical framework with CANDECOMP-PARAFAC alternating Poisson regression (CP-APR) and normalizing flows have proven to be powerful unsupervised machine learning methods that model multi-dimensional data and capture complex and multi-faceted details of behavior profiles in cyber security applications. In this study, we propose Hybrid Latent-Structural Fusion (HLSF), a weighted anomaly fusion framework integrating CP-APR structural anomaly scores with latent-space density scores derived from normalizing flows. In our experiments, we show that the HLSF framework improves anomaly detection performance on a dataset of real-world compromised user credentials collected from the large enterprise network of Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) during a red-teaming exercise, compared with using CP-APR or normalizing flows alone.
Dorianis M. Perez, Maksim E. Eren, Bryan E. Kaiser
Jul 7, 2026cs.LG

Modeling Normal Is All You Need: Joint Latent Clustering for Anomaly Detection in Multimodal Cyber-Physical Systems

Faults on a cyber-physical system (CPS) are too rare and unrepresentative to characterise, or even to select a model on, so detection must instead model normal behaviour; the standard point-adjusted evaluation, however, rewards detectors that never do. CPS normal behaviour is the union of many imbalanced, curved, thin-fringed operating regimes rather than a single blob; we state this structure as ten assumptions (A1-A10), abbreviated Massive, Implicit, Imbalanced Multimodality (MIIM). We model the normal law with a jointly learned latent representation plus explicit Gaussian-mixture mode clustering, scored in the latent rather than by a global density or a reconstruction residual, and evaluate under a deliberately fair protocol: raw point-wise metrics with no point adjustment, a trivial-detector difficulty split, prevalence-matched F1, and train-normal-only calibration. On three real CPS datasets (WADI, HAI, SKAB), the detector wins both the combined column and the difficult correlation/dynamics-fault column on all three, reaching difficult-subset AUROC 0.831 on HAI, 0.726 on WADI, and 0.610 on SKAB. The margin is largest on the two multimodal datasets the MIIM assumptions target and slimmest on the near-unimodal one, tracking multimodality as the thesis predicts, and it holds against three deep detectors (USAD, TranAD, GDN) re-computed with the same raw metrics, all of which collapse on the difficult subset. The methodological contributions are the MIIM assumption set, the difficulty-stratified fair protocol, and a latent-only score that drops reconstruction because a flexible decoder rebuilds the hard faults faithfully.
Alexander Apartsin, Yehudit Aperstein
Jun 26, 2026cs.CR

In-Vehicle Digital Twin-Based Collision Warning Framework with Sybil Attack Detection

Connected Vehicles (CVs) rely extensively on communication technologies to enable data-driven predictive analyses for enhancing performance and safety. These communication channels can be exploited by adversaries to launch cyberattacks such as Sybil attacks, which could threaten both safety-critical and mobility applications, leaving CVs vulnerable and putting human lives at risk. As CV deployment continues to expand, the need to detect and mitigate cyberattacks in real-time becomes increasingly urgent. This study presents an in-vehicle Digital Twin (DT)-based collision warning framework with built-in capabilities for Sybil attacks detection. The framework integrates a Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN) for learning temporal dependencies in vehicle trajectory data and Hierarchical Navigable Small World (HNSW) algorithms for efficient similarity-based classification. Our framework is evaluated on real-world Sybil attack data, collected through field experiments. The framework achieved accuracy, recall, and F1 scores of 0.984, 1.00, and 0.944, respectively, in detecting Sybil-generated fake vehicles. During the safety evaluation, the framework reduced the mean Time Exposed Time-To-Collision (TET) and mean Time Integrated Time-To-Collision (TIT) of near-collision events by 88% and 72%, respectively. Furthermore, real-world feasibility evaluation shows that the framework conformed to the standardized maximum allowable latency for safety applications and operated well within the capacity of modern processors -- demonstrating the promise of an in-vehicle DT-based framework as an attack mitigation mechanism against Sybil attacks for next-generation CVs.
Mohammad Imtiaz Hasan, Abyad Enan, Jean Michel Tine +3
Jun 19, 2026cs.LG

Privacy-Preserving Federated Temporal Graph Learning with Digital Twin--Guided Adaptive Deception for Cyber-Resilient IoMT

The rapid proliferation of IoT and IoMT devices introduces critical cybersecurity vulnerabilities in healthcare and industrial environments where resource-constrained devices operate under strict latency and data-privacy regulations. This paper presents the Federated Temporal Graph Convolutional Network with Advantage Actor-Critic (Federated TGCN-A2C), a privacy-preserving defense architecture integrating four mechanisms: a PyG-based Temporal GCN using GCNConv layers with global mean pooling and a learned anomaly gate for flow-level threat classification; LSTM-based Digital Twins generating per-device anomaly scores gating the classifier via learned sigmoid coupling; a Federated A2C agent selecting among ALLOW, ISOLATE, and HONEYPOT-REDIRECT actions based on a seven-dimensional state capturing confidence, entropy, anomaly magnitude, and traffic composition; and an enhanced honeypot layer converting suspicious traffic into threat intelligence with adaptive thresholds. Federated aggregation employs EMA-smoothed per-client validation losses as inverse-weighted FedAvg coefficients to stabilize global model updates under non-IID distributions, with cosine-annealed learning rates per round. Evaluated on CICDDoS 2019 and TON-IoT benchmarks, the framework achieves 99.48% and 99.61% test accuracy with weighted-F1 scores of 0.9948 and 0.9961, converging within 25 and 10 federated rounds, outperforming Fed-Inforce-Fusion by 0.21 percentage points while covering three additional attack categories. All sixteen CICDDoS 2019 classes achieve F1 of at least 0.9237 and all ten TON-IoT classes achieve F1 of at least 0.9488, including the severely imbalanced MITM category. Post-hoc explainability via SHAP, LIME, Grad-CAM, and counterfactual analysis confirms decisions are grounded in semantically meaningful flow features, supporting regulatory accountability in clinical deployments.
Syed Zeeshan Haider, Anwar Shah, Muneeb Arif +2
Jun 18, 2026cs.LG

Pseudo-Feature Padding: A Lightweight Defense Against False Data Injection in Power Grids

Deep Neural Networks DNNs have achieved remarkable accuracy in various tasks including their application in CyberPhysical Systems CPS for detecting False Data Injection Attacks FDIA during critical operations However the unique infrastructure of CPS makes DNNs vulnerable to exploitation by attackers aiming to evade detection Additionally the distinct nature of CPS presents challenges for conventional defense mechanisms against FDIA This paper proposes an innovative defense framework that strengthens DNNs against such attacks by introducing an additional input layer that performs padding in the input samples using pseudofeature values derived from the inputs statistical distribution This padding increases the input dimensionality in a randomized and dataaware manner making adversarial attacks computationally infeasible due to the nontransferable nature of crafted perturbations and the unpredictability of the padded structure Our method is lightweight modelagnostic and requires no modifications to the core architecture making it highly deployable in realworld CPS settings We evaluated our framework on critical power grid applications such as state estimation using the IEEE 14bus 30bus 118bus and 300bus systems Experiments under adversarial settings demonstrate that our padding strategy significantly improves model robustness with negligible impact on performance and effectively mitigates attacks that would otherwise bypass conventional defenses
Farhin Farhad Riya, Shahinul Hoque, Yingyuan Yang +2
Jun 17, 2026eess.SY

GDGU: A Gradient Difference-based Graph Unlearning Method for Cyberattack Localization in Electric Vehicle Charging Networks

Electric vehicle charging stations (EVCSs) can expose distribution feeders to cyberattacks. While machine learning methods, including graph neural networks, can localize which bus is compromised, significant challenges remain in data sharing and model training. For example, privacy regulations grant EVCS owners the right to delete their training data from a deployed model, yet retraining from scratch on every request is computationally prohibitive. To address this, we study graph unlearning (GU) for EVCS cyberattack localization, formulated as a feature-level unlearning problem on a graph-level multi-label classification task. Specifically, we propose gradient difference-based graph unlearning (GDGU), which removes the influence of the requested deletion data through a first-order parameter correction. The correction is computed from the gradient difference between the original training data and a modified dataset in which only the charging power features at the requested EVCS buses are unlearned. Then, a batch-normalization recalibration and a brief recovery fine-tuning step are applied to restore localization utility. We benchmark GDGU against two second-order GU baselines on the IEEE 34-bus, 123-bus, and 8500-node distribution networks across three graph neural network backbones and cumulative unlearning scenarios. GDGU matches the strongest baseline on localization utility and reaches forgetting fidelity close to full-retraining, while unlearning 10 to 12 times faster than retraining from scratch and using far less memory than the second-order GU baselines.
Nanhong Liu, Mucun Sun, Jie Zhang
Jun 16, 2026cs.CR

Multi-Source Cybersecurity Logs: An ATT&CK-Labeled Dataset and SLM Evaluation

Multi-stage cyberattacks span system, network, and browser logs. Detecting them requires correlating events across all three sources. Machine learning methods can learn these cross-source patterns, but they need labeled multi-source data. Existing public datasets fall short. Network-only datasets such as CICIDS and UNSW-NB15 miss host and browser activity. Host-focused datasets such as LMDG and CICAPT-IIoT lack browser telemetry. ATLAS includes all three sources but labels events only as malicious or benign, without MITRE Adversarial Tactics, Techniques, and Common Knowledge (ATT&CK) technique granularity. No public dataset combines all three sources with per-entry ATT&CK technique labels. We close the gap by building a multi-source log dataset of 870 sessions (70 attack, 800 benign) and approximately 2.3 million events. We captured system, network, and browser activity simultaneously on Windows endpoints. We labeled malicious events with ATT&CK technique IDs, covering 12 tactics and 53 techniques. We generated all attack data using real tools, including Remote Access Trojan (RAT), Command and Control (C2) tunnels, and cloud exfiltration. To demonstrate learnability, we fine-tuned three Small Language Models (SLMs) (Qwen2.5-1.5B, Llama-3.2-3B, Phi-4-Mini) using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). We compared each against its base variant across ten metrics on two tasks: chunk classification and ATT&CK technique identification. Fine-tuning improved every model on every metric. Chunk classification accuracy rose from approximately 8% in the base variants to between 90% and 97% after fine-tuning. Technique identification remained challenging, with the best exact-match accuracy at 42%, although high partial-match scores show the models captured most of the underlying reasoning.
Abir Ashab Niloy, Ahmed Ryan, Imamul Hossain Rafi +2
Jun 15, 2026cs.CR

Graph neural networks at war: integrating cybersecurity and drone intelligence in the Israeli-Iranian conflict

Physical cyber systems have brought about new threats and challenges in detection and immediate response. This study examines how Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) can be used to aid cybersecurity and drone management in a physical cyber system comprising of cyber intrusions and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). By providing a bridge between structural understanding of graphical neural networks, this work has provided an integrated procedure that allows intrusion detection systems to educate on underlying network structures, identify malicious activity, and facilitates drone response measures. Based on an emulation-based case study, cyberattacks models were created to provoke the responses of the drones, which proved that graph-based learning can assist with the situational awareness, swarm coordination, and adaptive maneuver. According to the performance valuation, this method has a detection rate of 94.2, average area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) of 0.955 and an average response time of 1.4 seconds. Comparative experiments reveal that proposed GraphSAGE network is more effective than the Graphical Convolutional Networks (GCNs) and Graphical Attention Networks (GATs) in the identical situation. Such findings prove that graphical neural networks can be used to avert intrusion and response of dynamic cyber-physical systems.
Sozan Sulaiman Maghdid, Tarik Ahmed Rashid, Shavan Askar
Jun 10, 2026cs.CV

DroneShield-AI: A Multi-Modal Sensor Fusion Framework for Real-Time Autonomous Drone Threat Detection, Behavioral Intent Classification, and Swarm Intelligence in Contested Airspace

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) threats have emerged as a defining security challenge of the 21st century. This paper presents DroneShield-AI, a unified open framework integrating six processing layers: RF signal classification, acoustic motor-signature detection, YOLOv8-based visual detection, evidence-weighted sensor fusion, a Behavioral Intent Classification Engine (BICE), and a Graph Neural Network Swarm Intelligence Module (GNN-SIM). BICE introduces the first systematic six-class threat taxonomy for drone flight patterns, enabling predictive operator alerts with a 30-second advance-warning horizon. GNN-SIM is the first open framework for adversarial multi-drone formation analysis using Graph Attention Networks. Evaluated on three publicly available real-world datasets, the fused pipeline achieves 96.1% detection accuracy, 3.2% false alarm rate, AUC-ROC: 0.981, and 142ms end-to-end latency on commodity CPU-class hardware at approximately 500500-780 USD total system cost. All code, model weights, and simulation datasets are publicly released at submission.
Marius Bayizere
Jun 8, 2026cs.LG

A Source Domain is All You Need: Source-Only Cross-OS Transfer Learning for APT Anomaly Detection via Semantic Alignment and Optimal Transport

Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) are stealthy, multi-stage cyberattacks whose detection is difficult due to scarce labeled traces, severe class imbalance, and the challenge of generating realistic malicious behavior. These challenges are amplified in cross-operating-system (cross-OS) settings, where a detector trained on one source platform must be deployed on an unlabeled target platform without access to target-domain labels. We study this source-only cross-OS APT detection problem using system-level provenance traces and propose a transport-based framework for ranking anomalous target processes under zero target supervision. The framework abstracts process behavior into structured natural-language descriptions, embeds them using pretrained language models, and constructs a source-normal reference for target scoring. It combines three evidence channels: semantic deviation from source-normal prototypes, structural deviation captured by graph autoencoding, and geometric deviation measured through Optimal Transport (OT). The main contribution is an OT-based barycentric anomaly score that projects target embeddings onto the source-normal manifold and quantifies residual transport mismatch. We further introduce entropy-weighted, angle-aware, and density-aware OT variants to capture uncertainty, directional drift, and sparse-support behavior. Evaluation on DARPA Transparent Computing data spanning Linux, Windows, BSD, and Android, across two APT scenarios and twelve cross-OS transfer pairs, shows that the proposed framework improves ROC-AUC and nDCG over source-only anomaly-detection baselines. The results demonstrate that source-only provenance modeling, combined with semantic abstraction and OT-based anomaly scoring, can support practical cross-platform APT detection without target-domain supervision.
Sidahmed Benabderrahmanea, Petko Valtchev, James Cheney +1
Jun 6, 2026cs.CR

An AI Security Agent for University ACMIS: Multi-Vector Threat Detection and Automated Response

University Academic Management Information Systems (ACMIS) are high-value targets for a wide spectrum of security threats including brute-force login attacks, payment fraud, privilege escalation, insider data theft, and academic integrity violations. Traditional rule-based intrusion detection systems are inadequate because many malicious activities are structurally indistinguishable from normal operations. This paper presents an AI-based security agent for ACMIS that combines supervised anomaly detection, behavioural analytics, and a natural language processing chatbot for secure password recovery. The agent monitors five operational layers: authentication, authorisation, financial transactions, user behaviour, and system health, and responds through a four-tier risk escalation framework. A modular architecture allows the core engine to be extended to other institutional systems. Experiments on a simulated ACMIS event log dataset of 147,922 sessions demonstrate a threat detection macro-average F1 of 0.966, compared to 0.156 for a rule-based baseline and 0.836 for a sequence-only (LSTM) baseline, with end-to-end critical-tier automated response latency under 1 ms on a single-node prototype. The integrated recovery chatbot achieves 97.1 percent identity verification accuracy and an 87.3 percent mass-reset attack detection rate with zero false positives on legitimate high volume recovery periods.
Joseph Walusimbi, Joshua Benjamin Ssentongo
Jun 4, 2026eess.SY

Attack Detection using Time Series Foundation Models

This paper addresses the problem of attack detection in cyber-physical systems without any knowledge of the plant model or its structure. A remotely located plant transmits sensor measurements to an operator over a network that is assumed to be under attack. We consider two classes of attacks: model-free replay attacks and model-based stealthy attacks. For the latter, we derive closed-form expressions for the optimal stealthy attack policy against a χ2χ^2 detector, for both linear and nonlinear systems. We then propose a model-structure-free detector based on TimesFM, a time-series foundation model developed by Google Research, which serves as a surrogate residual generator operating in a zero-shot fashion. We show empirically that the TimesFM-based detector achieves a comparable or superior attack detection performance. The efficacy of the proposed approach is demonstrated numerically on the IEEE 14-bus power system. We also demonstrate that TimesFM predictions can serve as a substitute for corrupted measurements, a practical mitigation technique when classical redundancy assumptions fail.
Sribalaji C. Anand, Anh Tung Nguyen, George J. Pappas
Jun 4, 2026cs.CR

TinyML-Driven Cybersecurity for Autonomous Spacecraft: Latency-Accuracy Analysis for SPARTA RF and Cyber Threat Detection

Autonomous spacecraft require rapid, lightweight, and reliable onboard detection of cyber-RF threats. Using the SPARTA attack model, we analyze the latency-accuracy trade-offs of TinyML-compatible classical models -- Random Forest, Logistic Regression, SVM, and MLP -- for detecting uplink jamming, Fake-NR spoofing, payload manipulation, ground-segment compromise, and unauthorized command injection. We present a physics-informed theoretical analysis of each model's computational complexity, VC dimension, Lipschitz continuity, and latency scaling, supported by empirical measurements on adversarial RF spectrograms generated via BandErasure, FakeNR, and NoiseBurst corruption modes. Results show that Logistic Regression achieves microsecond-level inference with only a 1% accuracy drop relative to Random Forest, making it an effective TinyML baseline for onboard autonomy. The study also identifies opportunities for advancing spacecraft cybersecurity through richer feature encoders and multi-timescale learning architectures, building on recent progress in edge intelligence and trustworthy AI.
Van Le, Trevor Tran, Tan Le
Jun 4, 2026cs.CR

Hybrid CNN-LSTM Framework for Intelligent Cyber Attack Detection and Prevention in U.S. Critical Digital Infrastructure: A Comparative Machine Learning Evaluation on CSE-CIC-IDS2018

Digital infrastructure is growing at a rapid pace in the United States, and as a result, exposure to advanced cyber threats to critical sectors including healthcare, finance, transportation, energy and government systems is growing. The traditional cybersecurity approaches, including signature-based intrusion detection systems, have become less effective against today's cyber attacks, as they are unable to detect unknown and changing attacks in real time. To overcome these constraints, this research suggests a smart cyber-defense system, which utilizes Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) algorithms in the detection and prevention of cyber attacks in the U.S. digital infrastructure. This study uses the CSE-CIC-IDS2018 dataset, which is a realistic network traffic dataset, along with various cyber attack scenarios, including Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), brute force attacks, botnets, infiltration attacks, and web-based attacks. A number of machine learning and deep learning models such as Random Forest, XGBoost, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks are implemented and evaluated to be used in identifying malicious network behavior and boosting the accuracy of intrusion detection. The framework proposed combines data preprocessing, feature engineering, real-time traffic monitoring, intelligent threat classification with automated prevention mechanisms to build cybersecurity resilience. E
Md. Iqbal Hossan, Md. Serajul Kabir Chowdhury Rubel, Md. Arifur Rahman +1
Jun 4, 2026cs.CV

Real-Time Threat Detection from Surveillance Cameras using Machine Learning

Ensuring public safety in densely populated urban environments remains a critical challenge, necessitating the deployment of intelligent and automated video surveillance systems. Traditional surveillance approaches rely heavily on manual monitoring, which is inefficient and susceptible to human fatigue, delayed response, and observational errors. To overcome these limitations, this work presents a real-time object detection-based surveillance framework. The proposed system focuses on detecting guns, knives, and region-specific blunt objects commonly involved in violent activities in Indian surveillance scenarios. A key contribution of this work is the use of a custom-created dataset collected using a mobile camera, consisting of 336 labeled images of blunt objects such as iron rods, wooden sticks, and plastic rods. This dataset is combined with a publicly available dataset of 7,623 images of guns and knives, forming a consolidated dataset of 7,959 images across three classes: gun, knife, and blunt object. The combined dataset is used to train a YOLOv8-based object detection model for real-time performance. Experimental evaluation shows that increasing the training duration significantly improves recall and average precision for the blunt object class without signs of overfitting. Overall, the proposed framework achieves an effective balance between accuracy and efficiency, making it suitable for deployment in real-world surveillance environments such as campuses, public spaces, and transportation areas.
Gajendra Mandal, J. P. Patra, Priyansh Mahant
Jun 4, 2026cs.CR

Dimensionality Reduction for Cyberattack Classification: A Comparative Evaluation of PCA and Linear Predictive Coding

High-dimensional feature representations are widely used in machine learning-based cyberattack detection systems. However, they increase computational complexity and may hinder deployment in resource-constrained environments. In this paper, we investigate feature compression techniques for cyberattack classification by comparing two dimensionality reduction approaches: Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Linear Predictive Coding (LPC). Compressed feature representations with varying dimensionalities are generated and evaluated across several classification models. Experimental analysis demonstrates that PCA preserves classification performance even under aggressive compression. On the other hand, LPC provides competitive predictive representations with slightly larger performance degradation. The results show that substantial reductions in feature dimensionality can be achieved with minimal impact on classification accuracy, highlighting the potential of lightweight feature compression for efficient cybersecurity analytics.
Nelly Elsayed, Zag ElSayed, Navid Asadizanjani
Jun 1, 2026cs.CR

SECUREVENT: Hybrid AI/ML Security Monitoring for Distributed Event-Based Systems

Distributed event-based systems have become a common substrate for Internet-scale publish/subscribe services, IoT telemetry, cloud-native microservices, and security operations pipelines. Their loose coupling and asynchronous delivery improve scalability, but they also expand the attack surface: publishers, brokers, subscribers, topics, schemas, and temporal ordering can each be abused without a single component observing the whole behavior. This paper proposes SECUREVENT, a hybrid AI/ML security-monitoring architecture for distributed event-based systems. The architecture combines traditional protections such as authenticated transport, topic-level authorization, and signed events with online anomaly detection, graph-aware behavioral features, complex-event policy rules, federated learning, and adversarial-ML governance. A deterministic prototype study over synthetic event-stream attacks illustrates how a hybrid AI/CEP monitor can improve recall over static rules while retaining a low false-positive rate. The central claim is not that machine learning replaces cryptographic and access-control mechanisms, but that model-based security monitoring is necessary when event flows, identities, schemas, and timing relationships are too dynamic for static controls alone.
Eric Liang
Jun 1, 2026cs.CR

IstGPT: LLM-based Anomaly Detection for Spatial-Temporal Graph in Industrial Systems

Industrial Internet systems face increasing threats from sophisticated industrial control system (ICS) attacks, resulting in critical safety incidents. However, existing tools exhibit limited effectiveness in real-time anomaly detection due to the complex dependencies among sensors and actuators. To tackle this, we present IstGPT, the first industrial anomaly detection tool based on LLMs and graph learning to provide real-time protection against a wide range of ICS attacks. IstGPT achieves fine-grained and precise modeling on spatial-temporal dependencies in industrial cyber-physical systems. It first leverages industrial multi-modal knowledge, including operational data, technical documents, and system diagrams, to extract sensor-actuator dependency graphs via multi-stage prompt engineering. Then, LLM-Optimation iteratively refines the graph based on node accuracy, edge consistency, and logical coherence. Finally, IstGPT integrated improved graph neural networks with an encoder-decoder architecture to detect anomalies via reconstruction errors. We evaluate IstGPT against 12 state-of-the-art baselines on 9 datasets, including 2 public, 6 simulated, and a real-world robotic arm dataset. IstGPT achieves the best F1-scores and eTaF1 (a newer time-aware metric) across nine datasets. We further discuss the feasibility of deploying IstGPT in real-world industrial scenarios.
Yuchen Zhang, Ning Xi, Pengbin Feng +5
May 30, 2026cs.CR

A Lightweight Hybrid MLP-Based Framework for Real-Time Phishing URL Detection Using Structural URL Features

Phishing attacks remain a major cybersecurity threat, exploiting deceptive URLs to steal sensitive user information. Traditional blacklist and rule-based detection approaches are reactive and often fail to identify newly emerging phishing URLs. This paper proposes a lightweight hybrid framework for real-time phishing URL detection that combines blacklist-based screening with a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) classifier operating solely on structural URL features. The framework extracts 16 URL-derived features capturing structural, domain-based, and security-related characteristics without requiring webpage content access, third-party APIs, or visual rendering, making it computationally efficient for real-time deployment. The system was trained and evaluated on the PhiUSIIL phishing dataset containing 235,795 labelled URLs. Experimental results show that the proposed MLP achieved 99.24% accuracy, 98.74% precision, 99.95% recall, 99.34% F1-score, and 99.65% ROC-AUC, outperforming Random Forest, Logistic Regression, XGBoost, LightGBM, and CatBoost under the same evaluation setting. The hybrid architecture achieved an average inference latency of 1.2 ms per URL and a peak throughput of 4,200 URLs per second under concurrent processing. A functional desktop application prototype, CyberGuard, further demonstrates deployment viability. The results indicate that the proposed framework provides an accurate and computationally efficient solution for real-time phishing URL detection in resource-constrained environments.
Uche Unoke Emmanuel, Gideon Francis Oghie
May 26, 2026cs.CR

Backdoor Attacks on Fault Detection and Localization in Cyber-Physical Systems

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) integrate sensing, communication, computation, and control to support critical infrastructure, including smart grids, industrial automation, and control systems. In the electrical utility domain, various controllers are used in CPS to ensure the system detects and recovers from faults, such as voltage fluctuations, and to perform load balancing in distribution systems. Machine learning- and deep learning-based fault detection and localization frameworks have recently gained significant attention in CPS for their ability to identify anomalies and operational failures in real time. However, these intelligent models are vulnerable to adversarial machine learning attacks, particularly backdoor attacks. In a backdoor attack, an adversary injects malicious patterns into the training data so that the model behaves normally most of the time but produces attacker-controlled outputs when triggered by specific patterns. This paper investigates the threat of backdoor attacks against fault detection and localization mechanisms in recent ML pipelines used in modern CPS systems. We define these threats and explore how they can be realized by designing triggers and evaluating their success in the CPS domain. Our experiments show the attack is successful even with 10% of poisoning.
Abile Jean, Kuniyilh S
May 24, 2026cs.LG

ASTRO: Adaptive Spatio-Temporal Reinforcement Optimization for GNN Powered Anomly Detection in Cyber Physical Systems

Anomaly detection in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) environments is essential to protect the Industrial Control Systems (ICS) and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) from occuring run time false data injection and other malicious attacks. The increasing complexity of sensor networks and interconnected control loops makes it difficult to identify anomalous behavior hidden within high-dimensional and time-dependent signals. To address these challenges, this article introduces Adaptive Spatio-Temporal Reinforcement Optimization ASTRO (ASTRO), a novel anomaly detection framework that pioneers the use of reinforcement learning for dynamic threshold optimization. By integrating a Deep Q-Network (DQN) with Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), temporal modelling and a Multi-Head Attention mechanism, ASTRO continuously adapts its decision boundaries to improve detection accuracy. The GNN component models the spatial relations among sensors, Temporal model captures time series dependencies and the attention layer highlights most informative time steps. The model generates continuous anomaly scores, which are transformed into binary decisions using an adaptive threshold, optimized via a Deep Q-Network (DQN). The ASTRO approach is evaluated on two real world industrial benchmarks: the Secure Water Treatment (SWaT) and Water Distribution (WADI) datasets. The proposed model achieves an exceptional performance on the SWaT with F1 score of 0.990. Moreover, on highly complex 127 end devices WADI dataset, it secures F1 score of 0.788, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines by nearly 14%. Results across multiple runs confirm consistent generalization and stability. These experiments demonstrate that the ASTRO framework is highly practical and scalable method for strengthening the large scale cyber physical infrastructures
Rai Ali Yar, Umaisa Lail, Anwar Shah
May 21, 2026cs.LG

Cyber-Physical Anomaly Detection in IoT-Enabled Smart Grids Using Machine Learning and Metaheuristic Feature Optimization

Modern smart grids rely on dense measurement infrastructures, communication links, and intelligent field devices. Although this improves supervision and control, it also increases vulnerability to cyber-physical disruptions. Operators must distinguish physical incidents, such as faults or line disturbances, from malicious actions, such as false data injection or unauthorized command execution. This chapter investigates this problem using the well-known MSU/ORNL Power System Attack Dataset. The proposed method combines machine learning with genetic-algorithm-based feature selection. The objective is twofold: to classify attack and natural events accurately, and to determine whether a reduced set of physically informative PMU/IED measurements can support reliable detection. Several baseline models are evaluated, including logistic regression, RBF-SVM, XGBoost, Random Forest, and Extra Trees. The results show that tree-based ensemble models are the most effective for the considered dataset, with Extra Trees providing the strongest full-feature baseline. After feature selection, the GA + Extra Trees model reduces the clean PMU feature space from 112 attributes to an average of 27.4 attributes over five runs, while increasing macro-F1 from 0.9118 to 0.9212 and ROC-AUC from 0.9791 to 0.9837. These results indicate that many synchronized electrical measurements are redundant. A compact subset of phasor-based features can still provide accurate and interpretable anomaly detection in smart grids.
Adis Alihodžić, Eva Tuba, Milan Tuba
May 21, 2026cs.CR

UNAD+: An Explainable Hybrid Framework for Unknown Network Attack Detection

The detection of previously unseen network attacks remains a major challenge for intrusion detection systems. Although supervised learning methods often perform well on known attack classes, they are limited when new attack types are not represented in the training data. Unsupervised methods are more suitable for detecting zero-day attacks, as they do not require labelled attack samples, but they often suffer from high false positive rates, which limits their real-world usefulness. This paper presents UNAD+, an enhanced framework for unknown network attack detection derived from the previously proposed Unknown Network Attack Detector (UNAD). UNAD+ combines a benign-only unsupervised ensemble with Weighted Majority Voting (WMV), a supervised refinement stage trained on pseudo-labelled detections, and a post hoc explainability layer that provides both local and global explanations. The framework was evaluated on the CICIDS2017 and NSL-KDD benchmark datasets. The results show that UNAD+ improves on the original UNAD framework, achieving F1-scores above 98% across the benchmark datasets while significantly reducing false positives and enhancing transparency and deployment suitability through integrated explainability.
Saif Alzubi, Frederic Stahl
May 19, 2026cs.CR

Latent Geometry as a Structural Monitor: Eigenspace Alignment for Anomaly Detection in Anonymity Networks

Traditional anomaly detection marks events when measured signals cross predefined thresholds. This captures the moment of transition but not the structural pressure that precedes it. We propose treating large behavioral populations as geometric energy landscapes whose deformation can be measured before and during major transitions. The central thesis is that structure precedes geometry: the structural organization of the population is the signal, and geometric metrics are instruments for measuring it. Applied to the Tor anonymity network across 67 consecutive daily observation windows, the dual-observer pipeline identifies a stable nine-dimensional load-bearing subspace invariant across the observation period and validates this structure by Monte Carlo simulation at 16.8 sigma above the noise floor. Primary detection gates achieve 0.0% false positive rate on 24 confirmed stable windows. Forensic analysis of the February 20, 2026 confirmed infrastructure event formally falsifies the relay-departure hypothesis, identifying connectivity degradation without topology change as a detectable network failure mode. The result is a candidate structural-monitoring framework for behavioral populations with sufficient telemetry.
Vaibhav Chhabra
May 19, 2026cs.CR

Quantum Machine Learning for Cyber-Physical Anomaly Detection in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: A Leakage-Free Evaluation with Proxy-Audited Feature Sets

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are cyber-physical systems whose attack surface spans networked avionics and on-board sensor fusion: a compromised GPS or battery module can mimic a benign mission segment and evade naive anomaly detectors. We present a leakage-free evaluation of quantum machine learning for UAV anomaly detection on the multi-sensor TLM:UAV benchmark. Three contributions support the study. (i) A group-aware temporal protocol (B2) partitions the dataset into ten contiguous TimeUS blocks and evaluates over ten seeds, eliminating the inflation produced by random stratified splits that mix neighbouring samples. (ii) A three-mode feature audit (full/loose/strict) quantifies how much accuracy stems from instantaneous physical signals versus contextual proxies (cumulative energy, battery state, GPS trajectory). (iii) A hybrid XGBoost + Data Reuploading (DRU) classifier is benchmarked against five paired non-linear controls (raw, PCA, polynomial-2, random-RBF, and an untrained DRU map) under identical budgets. The standalone DRU does not consistently match the strongest classical baseline across seeds; however, the trained-DRU hybrid is the only model whose mean F1 macro shifts upward from full to strict (+0.05), a directional signal that the per-seed standard deviations prevent from being interpreted as a statistically established difference. The trained-DRU hybrid also records the lowest mean false-alarm rate under proxy-free evaluation, subject to the inter-seed variance reported. We frame this as an incremental, reproducible quantum-enhanced hybrid benefit, and provide an open Qiskit 2.x implementation as a benchmark for cybersecurity analytics in NISQ-era aerospace systems.
Carlos A. Durán Paredes, Javier E. León Calderón, Nicolás Sánchez Perea +2
May 17, 2026eess.SY

Latency-Aware Deep Learning Benchmark for Real-Time Cyber-Physical Attack and Fault Classification in Inverter-Dominated Power Grids

This work introduces a latency-aware benchmarking framework for evaluating deep learning models in power system anomaly detection using high-fidelity, time-domain signals generated from an industry-grade electromagnetic transient simulator. Eight neural network architectures, ranging from MLPs to Transformers, were systematically evaluated on streaming datasets representing both physical faults and cyber-attacks in inverter-dominated networks. All models successfully classified two representative multi-event sequences in real time with sub-cycle response times below 15 ms. However, although classification decisions occurred within one cycle, the end-to-end inference latency consistently exceeded three cycles, ranging from 50 to 90 ms. These results highlight a critical gap between algorithmic capability and protection-grade deployment, pointing to the need for further optimization and hardware acceleration. The findings establish a reproducible benchmark for sub-cycle anomaly detection and provide guidance for transitioning machine learning methods from research prototypes to real-world protection applications.
Emad Abukhousa, Saman Zonouz, A. P. Sakis Meliopoulos
May 17, 2026cs.CR

Filter-then-Verify: A Multiphase GNN and ModernBERT Framework for Social Engineering Detection in Email Networks

Social engineering attacks exploit human trust rather than software vulnerabilities, making them difficult to detect using conventional filters. We propose a two-stage filter-then-verify framework combining inductive Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for structural anomaly detection with a co-attention ModernBERT model for content verification. The GNN identifies anomalous sender-receiver patterns, while BERT analyzes message context to reduce false positives. Using the Enron dataset augmented with realistic synthetic campaigns, we show that the framework achieves 86% recall in structural filtering and over 92% precision after BERT refinement, effectively detecting both external attacks and insider threats. Our results demonstrate that combining structural and content analysis allows practical, scalable detection of multi-stage social engineering attacks in email networks.
Barsat Khadka, Prasant Koirala, Kshitiz Neupane +1
May 14, 2026eess.SY

Quantifying Cyber-Vulnerability in Power Electronics Systems via an Impedance-Based Attack Reachable Domain

Power electronics systems are increasingly exposed to cyber threats due to their integration with digital controllers and communication networks. However, an attacker-oriented metric is still lacking to quantify the extent to which a node can be pushed toward instability within a privilege-constrained action space. This letter proposes an impedance-based Attack Reachable Domain (ARD) framework that maps feasible adversarial actions to critical-eigenvalue migration through impedance reshaping. Based on the ARD, an Attack Penetration Index is defined to quantify node-level cyber-vulnerability by jointly characterizing the penetration of the nominal stability margin and the accessibility of successful destabilizing attacks within a privilege-constrained action space. To make the proposed assessment computable when inverter models are unavailable, a practical gray-box workflow is further established by integrating existing impedance identification and differentiable surrogate tools. Case studies on a 4-bus system and a modified IEEE 39-bus system show that coordinated cross-layer manipulations are markedly more damaging than isolated single-layer attacks, and that the proposed metric reveals vulnerability patterns that cannot be inferred from grid-strength indicators.
Hongwei Zhen, Ze Yu, Xin Xiang +2
May 13, 2026cs.AI

Product-Aware Deep Autoencoders for Robust Process Monitoring in Multi-Product Cyber-Physical Systems

As Industry 4.0 accelerates the integration of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) in manufacturing, robust anomaly detection has become critical for ensuring process safety and security. Current data-driven approaches typically employ "product-agnostic" or global models trained on the aggregate of all normal operating data. However, modern industrial facilities frequently operate under diverse product grades. While computationally simple, these global models inherently expand their decision boundaries to accommodate the variance of multiple modes, creating a "blind spot" where subtle anomalies or targeted cyber-physical attacks may be masked by the wide acceptance region of the model. In this work, we first demonstrate that the vulnerability described above is present in global-agnostic models operating across multiple product grades. We then present a Product-Aware Autoencoder as a principled mitigation that restricts the learning domain to grade-specific distributions. While this approach reduces the identified blind-spot risk, we do not claim it as the optimal mitigation among all possible alternatives. We rigorously validate this approach against a Global Agnostic baseline using the Extended Tennessee Eastman Process (TEP) benchmark. Our empirical results indicate that the Product-Aware framework performs comparably to the global baseline on standard detection metrics, while offering improved robustness to product-grade-specific operating modes. Most critically, stress tests simulating our hypothetical attack scenarios reveal that while the global model fails to detect operational deviations in 77.8% of the scenarios, the product-aware system achieves 100% detection accuracy. These findings suggest that, in flexible manufacturing environments, generalized anomaly detectors can pose non-trivial security risks, motivating a shift toward mode-aware diagnostic architectures.
MD Shafikul Islam, Jordan Carden
May 13, 2026cs.CR

Context-Aware Web Attack Detection in Open-Source SIEM Systems via MITRE ATT&CK-Enriched Behavioral Profiling

Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems aggregate log data from heterogeneous sources to detect coordinated attacks. Traditional rule-based correlation engines struggle to classify multi-step web application attacks because they examine each event without reference to the behavioural history of the originating host. We present Smart-SIEM, an AI module for the open-source Wazuh SIEM platform with two contributions: (1) a per-source-IP behavioural context vector encoding HTTP response-status distributions, peak rule activation counts, and MITRE ATT&CK technique frequencies from the N most recent prior events; (2) a two-stage hybrid cascade combining LightGBM for binary attack detection and XGBoost for six-class attack categorisation. Evaluated on 46,454 purpose-built Wazuh security events, context features improve all tested gradient boosting algorithms from ~0.705 macro F1 to 0.947-0.967 (Stage 1) and 0.876-0.914 (Stage 2), an average gain of +0.254 and +0.324 respectively. The hybrid cascade achieves F1 of 0.967 (binary) and 0.914 (six-class). Wazuh's native rule engine detects 0% of Brute Force and Broken Authentication events; the AI module detects 100% and 98.3% respectively. A self-adaptive retraining mechanism recovers from concept drift: F1 drops from 0.905 to 0.465 when unseen attack types emerge, recovering to 0.814 after retraining on the combined corpus.
Badr Alboushy, Assef Jafar, Mohamad Aljnidi +2
May 7, 2026cs.CR

PAMPOS: Causal Transformer-based Trajectory Prediction for Attack-Agnostic Misbehavior Detection in V2X Networks

Misbehavior detection in Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) networks is a second line of defense against insider falsification attacks that cryptographic mechanisms alone cannot address. Existing learning-based Misbehavior Detection Schemes (MDSs) are supervised, requiring labeled attack samples at training time, thus failing to counter unseen falsification attacks. We present PAMPOS, a causal transformer-decoder trained on benign VeReMi++ trajectories to learn normal mobility patterns. At inference time, misbehavior is identified as a deviation from the model's next-step kinematic predictions using a top-K normalized anomaly scoring mechanism that localizes falsification to specific kinematic features, without requiring attack-labeled training data. We evaluate PAMPOS across all 19 attack types in VeReMi++ under rush-hour and afternoon scenarios, achieving Area Under the Curve (AUC) values of up to 0.98 and F1-scores of up to 0.95 for most attack categories.
Konstantinos Kalogiannis, Ahmed Mohamed Hussain, Panos Papadimitratos
Apr 30, 2026cs.LG

PhaseNet++: Phase-Aware Frequency-Domain Anomaly Detection for Industrial Control Systems via Phase Coherence Graphs

Multivariate time series anomaly detection in ICS has attracted growing attention due to the increasing threat of cyber-physical attacks on critical infrastructure. State-of-the-art methods model inter-sensor relationships from raw time-domain amplitude values, using graph neural networks, Transformers. However, these methods discard the phase spectrum produced by time frequency transformations, We argue that phase information constitutes a complementary and previously overlooked detection modality for ICS anomaly detection. We present PhaseNet++, a frequency-domain autoencoder that operates on the Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT) of sliding sensor windows, retaining both magnitude and phase spectra. A Phase Coherence Index (PCI), inspired by the Phase Locking Value from neuroscience, summarizes pairwise phase consistency across frequency bins into a continuous adjacency matrix. This matrix guides a graph attention network that propagates information preferentially among phase-synchronized sensors. A sensor-token Transformer encoder captures system-wide structure, and a dual-head decoder reconstructs magnitude and phase jointly via circular and coherence-aware objectives. Evaluated on the Secure Water Treatment (SWaT) benchmark, PhaseNet++ achieves an F1-score of 90.98%, ROC-AUC of 95.66%, and average precision of 91.51%. Ablation studies show that the phase-aware front-end and PCI graph module together add only 264,816 parameters, demonstrating that the phase inductive bias is lightweight. While the absolute F1-score is second best than that of all recent raw-value methods evaluated under different protocols, we position this work as the first systematic study of phase-domain anomaly detection for ICS.
Raviteja Bommireddy, Varshith Bandaru, Lohith Pakala +1
Apr 22, 2026cs.CR

DAIRE: A lightweight AI model for real-time detection of Controller Area Network attacks in the Internet of Vehicles

The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is advancing modern transportation by improving safety, efficiency, and intelligence. However, the reliance on the Controller Area Network (CAN) introduces critical security risks, as CAN-based communication is highly vulnerable to cyberattacks. Addressing this challenge, we propose DAIRE (Detecting Attacks in IoV in REal-time), a lightweight machine learning framework designed for real-time detection and classification of CAN attacks. DAIRE is built on a lightweight artificial neural network (ANN) where each layer contains Ni = i x c neurons, with Ni representing the number of neurons in the ith layer and c corresponding to the total number of attack classes. Other hyperparameters are determined empirically to ensure real-time operation. To support the detection and classification of various IoV attacks, such as Denial-of-Service, Fuzzy, and Spoofing, DAIRE employs the sparse categorical cross-entropy loss function and root mean square propagation for loss minimization. In contrast to more resource-intensive architectures, DAIRE leverages a lightweight ANN to reduce computational demands while still delivering strong performance. Experimental results on the CICIoV2024 and Car-Hacking datasets demonstrate DAIRE's effectiveness, achieving an average detection rate of 99.88%, a false positive rate of 0.02%, and an overall accuracy of 99.96%. Furthermore, DAIRE significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in inference speed, with a classification time of just 0.03 ms per sample. These results highlight DAIRE's effectiveness in detecting IoV cyberattacks and its practical suitability for real-time deployment in vehicular systems, underscoring its vital role in strengthening automotive cybersecurity.
Shahid Alam, Amina Jameel, Zahida Parveen +4