Adaptive Malware Detection Using Sequential Feature Selection: a Dueling Double Deep Q-Network (D3QN) Framework for Intelligent Classification

Traditional malware detection methods exhibit computational inefficiency due to exhaustive feature extraction requirements, creating accuracy-efficiency trade-offs that limit real-time deployment. We formulate malware classification as a Markov Decision Process with episodic feature acquisition a...

ARMOR: Robust Reinforcement Learning-Based Control for UAVs under Physical Attacks

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles UAVs depend on onboard sensors for perception, navigation, and control. However, these sensors are susceptible to physical attacks, such as GPS spoofing, that can corrupt state estimates and lead to unsafe behavior. While reinforcement learning RL offers adaptive control...

Autonomous Cyber Resilience Via a Co-Evolutionary Arms Race within a Fortified Digital Twin Sandbox

The convergence of IT and OT has created hyper-connected ICS, exposing critical infrastructure to a new class of adaptive, intelligent adversaries that render static defenses obsolete. Existing security paradigms often fail to address a foundational "Trinity of Trust," comprising the fidelity of...

Adaptive Alert Prioritisation in Security Operations Centres Via Learning to Defer with Human Feedback

Alert prioritisation AP is crucial for security operations centres SOCs to manage the overwhelming volume of alerts and ensure timely detection and response to genuine threats, while minimising alert fatigue. Although predictive AI can process large alert volumes and identify known patterns, it...

VulStamp: Vulnerability Assessment Using Large Language Model

Although modern vulnerability detection tools enable developers to efficiently identify numerous security flaws, indiscriminate remediation efforts often lead to superfluous development expenses. This is particularly true given that a substantial portion of detected vulnerabilities either possess...

LLM-Based Dynamic Differential Testing for Database Connectors with Reinforcement Learning-Guided Prompt Selection

Database connectors are critical components enabling applications to interact with underlying database management systems DBMS, yet their security vulnerabilities often remain overlooked. Unlike traditional software defects, connector vulnerabilities exhibit subtle behavioral patterns and are...

A Comprehensive Survey on Underwater Acoustic Target Positioning and Tracking: Progress, Challenges, and Perspectives

Underwater target tracking technology plays a pivotal role in marine resource exploration, environmental monitoring, and national defense security. Given that acoustic waves represent an effective medium for long-distance transmission in aquatic environments, underwater acoustic target tracking h...

From Static to Adaptive Defense: Federated Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning-Driven Moving Target Defense against DoS Attacks in UAV Swarm Networks

The proliferation of unmanned aerial vehicle UAV swarms has enabled a wide range of mission-critical applications, but also exposes UAV networks to severe Denial-of-Service DoS threats due to their open wireless environment, dynamic topology, and resource constraints. Traditional static or...

Efficient RL-Based Cache Vulnerability Exploration by Penalizing Useless Agent Actions

Cache-timing attacks exploit microarchitectural characteristics to leak sensitive data, posing a severe threat to modern systems. Despite its severity, analyzing the vulnerability of a given cache structure against cache-timing attacks is challenging. To this end, a method based on Reinforcement...

Improving LLM Agents with Reinforcement Learning on Cryptographic CTF Challenges

Large Language Models LLMs still struggle with the structured reasoning and tool-assisted computation needed for problem solving in cybersecurity applications. In this work, we introduce "random-crypto", a cryptographic Capture-the-Flag CTF challenge generator framework that we use to fine-tune a...

ChatGPT o3 Resists Shutdown Despite Instructions, Study Claims

ChatGPT o3 resists shutdown despite explicit instructions, raising fresh concerns over AI safety, alignment, and reinforcement learning behaviors...

Efficient and Stealthy Jailbreak Attacks Via Adversarial Prompt Distillation from LLMs to SLMs

Attacks on large language models LLMs in jailbreaking scenarios raise many security and ethical issues. Current jailbreak attack methods face problems such as low efficiency, high computational cost, and poor cross-model adaptability and versatility, which make it difficult to cope with the rapid...

AI-Driven Dynamic Firewall Optimization Using Reinforcement Learning for Anomaly Detection and Prevention

The growing complexity of cyber threats has rendered static firewalls increasingly ineffective for dynamic, real-time intrusion prevention. This paper proposes a novel AI-driven dynamic firewall optimization framework that leverages deep reinforcement learning DRL to autonomously adapt and update...

GuardReasoner-VL: Safeguarding VLMs Via Reinforced Reasoning

To enhance the safety of VLMs, this paper introduces a novel reasoning-based VLM guard model dubbed GuardReasoner-VL. The core idea is to incentivize the guard model to deliberatively reason before making moderation decisions via online RL. First, we construct GuardReasoner-VLTrain, a reasoning...

Unveiling the Black Box: a Multi-Layer Framework for Explaining Reinforcement Learning-Based Cyber Agents

Reinforcement Learning RL agents are increasingly used to simulate sophisticated cyberattacks, but their decision-making processes remain opaque, hindering trust, debugging, and defensive preparedness. In high-stakes cybersecurity contexts, explainability is essential for understanding how...

Improved Algorithms for Differentially Private Language Model Alignment

Language model alignment is crucial for ensuring that large language models LLMs align with human preferences, yet it often involves sensitive user data, raising significant privacy concerns. While prior work has integrated differential privacy DP with alignment techniques, their performance...

Adaptive Security Policy Management in Cloud Environments Using Reinforcement Learning

The security of cloud environments, such as Amazon Web Services AWS, is complex and dynamic. Static security policies have become inadequate as threats evolve and cloud resources exhibit elasticity 1. This paper addresses the limitations of static policies by proposing a security policy managemen...

Remote Rowhammer Attack Using Adversarial Observations on Federated Learning Clients

Federated Learning FL has the potential for simultaneous global learning amongst a large number of parallel agents, enabling emerging AI such as LLMs to be trained across demographically diverse data. Central to this being efficient is the ability for FL to perform sparse gradient updates and...

DMRL: Data- and Model-Aware Reward Learning for Data Extraction

Large language models LLMs are inherently vulnerable to unintended privacy breaches. Consequently, systematic red-teaming research is essential for developing robust defense mechanisms. However, current data extraction methods suffer from several limitations: 1 rely on dataset duplicates...

Large Language Models Are Autonomous Cyber Defenders

Fast and effective incident response is essential to prevent adversarial cyberattacks. Autonomous Cyber Defense ACD aims to automate incident response through Artificial Intelligence AI agents that plan and execute actions. Most ACD approaches focus on single-agent scenarios and leverage...