Explainable but Vulnerable: Adversarial Attacks on XAI Explanation in Cybersecurity Applications

Explainable Artificial Intelligence XAI has aided machine learning ML researchers with the power of scrutinizing the decisions of the black-box models. XAI methods enable looking deep inside the models' behavior, eventually generating explanations along with a perceived trust and transparency...

ALPHA: LLM-Enabled Active Learning for Human-Free Network Anomaly Detection

Network log data analysis plays a critical role in detecting security threats and operational anomalies. Traditional log analysis methods for anomaly detection and root cause analysis rely heavily on expert knowledge or fully supervised learning models, both of which require extensive labeled dat...

Explainable Ensemble Learning for Graph-Based Malware Detection

Malware detection in modern computing environments demands models that are not only accurate but also interpretable and robust to evasive techniques. Graph neural networks GNNs have shown promise in this domain by modeling rich structural dependencies in graph-based program representations such a...

ProvX: Generating Counterfactual-Driven Attack Explanations for Provenance-Based Detection

Provenance graph-based intrusion detection systems are deployed on hosts to defend against increasingly severe Advanced Persistent Threat. Using Graph Neural Networks to detect these threats has become a research focus and has demonstrated exceptional performance. However, the widespread adoption...

SAEL: Leveraging Large Language Models with Adaptive Mixture-Of-Experts for Smart Contract Vulnerability Detection

With the increasing security issues in blockchain, smart contract vulnerability detection has become a research focus. Existing vulnerability detection methods have their limitations: 1 Static analysis methods struggle with complex scenarios. 2 Methods based on specialized pre-trained models...

Large Language Model-Based Framework for Explainable Cyberattack Detection in Automatic Generation Control Systems

The increasing digitization of smart grids has improved operational efficiency but also introduced new cybersecurity vulnerabilities, such as False Data Injection Attacks FDIAs targeting Automatic Generation Control AGC systems. While machine learning ML and deep learning DL models have shown...

PiMRef: Detecting and Explaining Ever-Evolving Spear Phishing Emails with Knowledge Base Invariants

Phishing emails are a critical component of the cybercrime kill chain due to their wide reach and low cost. Their ever-evolving nature renders traditional rule-based and feature-engineered detectors ineffective in the ongoing arms race between attackers and defenders. The rise of large language...

PHASE: Passive Human Activity Simulation Evaluation

Cybersecurity simulation environments, such as cyber ranges, honeypots, and sandboxes, require realistic human behavior to be effective, yet no quantitative method exists to assess the behavioral fidelity of synthetic user personas. This paper presents PHASE Passive Human Activity Simulation...

Can Large Language Models Improve Phishing Defense? A Large-Scale Controlled Experiment on Warning Dialogue Explanations

Phishing has become a prominent risk in modern cybersecurity, often used to bypass technological defences by exploiting predictable human behaviour. Warning dialogues are a standard mitigation measure, but the lack of explanatory clarity and static content limits their effectiveness. In this pape...

A Lightweight IDS for Early APT Detection Using a Novel Feature Selection Method

An Advanced Persistent Threat APT is a multistage, highly sophisticated, and covert form of cyber threat that gains unauthorized access to networks to either steal valuable data or disrupt the targeted network. These threats often remain undetected for extended periods, emphasizing the critical...

Explain First, Trust Later: LLM-Augmented Explanations for Graph-Based Crypto Anomaly Detection

The decentralized finance DeFi community has grown rapidly in recent years, pushed forward by cryptocurrency enthusiasts interested in the vast untapped potential of new markets. The surge in popularity of cryptocurrency has ushered in a new era of financial crime. Unfortunately, the novelty of t...

Explainable AI for Enhancing IDS against Advanced Persistent Kill Chain

Advanced Persistent Threats APTs represent a sophisticated and persistent cy-bersecurity challenge, characterized by stealthy, multi-phase, and targeted attacks aimed at compromising information systems over an extended period. Develop-ing an effective Intrusion Detection System IDS capable of...

Differentially Private Explanations for Clusters

The dire need to protect sensitive data has led to various flavors of privacy definitions. Among these, Differential privacy DP is considered one of the most rigorous and secure notions of privacy, enabling data analysis while preserving the privacy of data contributors. One of the fundamental...

Interpretable Anomaly Detection in Encrypted Traffic Using SHAP with Machine Learning Models

The widespread adoption of encrypted communication protocols such as HTTPS and TLS has enhanced data privacy but also rendered traditional anomaly detection techniques less effective, as they often rely on inspecting unencrypted payloads. This study aims to develop an interpretable machine...

On the Interplay of Explainability, Privacy and Predictive Performance with Explanation-Assisted Model Extraction

Machine Learning as a Service MLaaS has gained important attraction as a means for deploying powerful predictive models, offering ease of use that enables organizations to leverage advanced analytics without substantial investments in specialized infrastructure or expertise. However, MLaaS...

Privacy Risks and Preservation Methods in Explainable Artificial Intelligence: a Scoping Review

Explainable Artificial Intelligence XAI has emerged as a pillar of Trustworthy AI and aims to bring transparency in complex models that are opaque by nature. Despite the benefits of incorporating explanations in models, an urgent need is found in addressing the privacy concerns of providing this...

Dual Explanations Via Subgraph Matching for Malware Detection

Interpretable malware detection is crucial for understanding harmful behaviors and building trust in automated security systems. Traditional explainable methods for Graph Neural Networks GNNs often highlight important regions within a graph but fail to associate them with known benign or maliciou...

Vulnerability Researchers: Check out The Critical Thinking Podcast

Today, The Wordfence Bug Bounty Program was featured on an episode of the Critical Thinking Podcast, a top resource and community for bug bounty researchers. Critical Thinking is a podcast focused on ethical hacking and security analysis and is described as a “by Hackers for Hackers podcast focus...

What Really Caused Facebook's 500M-User Data Leak?

The company's explanations have been confusing and inconsistent, but there are finally some answers...

Spectre and Meltdown Attacks

After a week or so of rumors, everyone is now reporting about the Spectre and Meltdown attacks against pretty much every modern processor out there. These are side-channel attacks where one process can spy on other processes. They affect computers where an untrusted browser window can execute cod...