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AI for Cybersecurity and Emerging Technologies for Secure Systems

A Special Issue of Electronics (ISSN 2079-9292) belonging to the section "Artificial Intelligence".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 15 December 2026 | Viewed by 2929

Editors


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Guest Editor
Department of Computer Science, California State University Sacramento, Sacramento, CA 95819, USA
Interests: smart contracts; blockchain; Dapp; consensus protocols; network security; computer security; artificial intelligence (AI); cyber–AI applications
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Computer Science, Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro, TN 37132, USA
Interests: blockchain and smart contracts; cyber security; artificial intelligence and security; legal contracts and natural language processing; metaverse; fuzzy logic; data cooperatives
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Cybersecurity continues to evolve as digital systems expand across distributed, data-intensive, and decentralized infrastructures. The growing dependence on cloud computing, IoT, and blockchain-based applications calls for security frameworks that are not only intelligent, explainable, and verifiable but also grounded in rigorous theoretical foundations. This Special Issue focuses on both theoretical advancements and applied innovations in artificial intelligence and emerging security technologies that enhance the protection, resilience, and transparency of modern computing environments. The issue recognizes that traditional, rule-based defenses must give way to autonomous, adaptive, and data-driven architectures capable of addressing complex and persistent cyber threats.

This Special Issue aims to feature AI-assisted, blockchain-enabled, and mathematically verifiable approaches that improve system reliability, trust, and data assurance. Theoretical contributions may address formal security modeling, cryptographic proofs, explainable learning models, and algorithmic verification, while applied studies may explore machine learning–based intrusion detection, blockchain and smart contract security, privacy-preserving computation, and decentralized trust management. The collection also welcomes emerging research on the responsible use of generative AI for security applications, including its role in automated threat simulation, vulnerability analysis, and synthetic data generation for training resilient defense models. Submissions demonstrating measurable improvements in risk prediction, access control, incident response, or secure data exchange are highly encouraged.

Dr. Syed Badruddoja
Dr. Kritagya Upadhyay
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Keywords

  • AI for cybersecurity
  • blockchain security
  • smart contract auditing
  • cyber infrastructure protection
  • machine learning for threat detection
  • privacy-preserving cryptography
  • trust and identity management
  • secure data exchange
  • intrusion detection and prevention
  • zero-trust architecture
  • formal verification for security
  • risk prediction and analysis
  • cloud and IoT security
  • decentralized trust frameworks
  • secure distributed systems
  • explainable intrusion and anomaly detection
  • interpretable machine learning for threat analysis
  • large language models (LLMs) for cybersecurity
  • AI-assisted threat intelligence
  • human-centered and trustworthy AI systems

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Published Papers (3 papers)

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Research

14 pages, 2099 KB  
Article
Time-Series Modeling-Based Early Detection of DDoS Attacks in Drone Networks
by ChungMan Oh, JaePil Youn, WonHo Ryu and Jin Ho Park
Electronics 2026, 15(13), 2945; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics15132945 - 6 Jul 2026
Viewed by 346
Abstract
Drone (UAV)-based ad hoc networks are highly vulnerable to Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks due to their resource constraints and dynamic connectivity. To ensure the survivability of UAVs, ultra-low latency early threat detection is essential. This study proposes three novel time-series network [...] Read more.
Drone (UAV)-based ad hoc networks are highly vulnerable to Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks due to their resource constraints and dynamic connectivity. To ensure the survivability of UAVs, ultra-low latency early threat detection is essential. This study proposes three novel time-series network metrics—Packet Flood Rate (PFR), Link Jitter Index (LJI), and Network Congestion Factor (NCF)—optimized for capturing the dynamic characteristics of DDoS attacks in drone networks. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed metrics, we applied lightweight deep learning architectures, including 1D-CNN, GRU, and LSTM. The experimental results demonstrate that the 1D-CNN model, guided by the proposed metrics, achieved the highest accuracy with an F1 Score of 0.9669 and an ROC-AUC of 0.9971. Notably, in terms of Average Detection Delay, a critical factor for early defense, the metric-driven 1D-CNN recorded 0.364 steps, reducing the detection time by approximately 30% compared to GRU (0.527) and LSTM (0.522) with statistical significance (p < 0.001, d = 0.6). Furthermore, despite requiring significantly fewer parameters (20,097), the 1D-CNN achieved a per-window inference latency of 0.611 ms on a standard CPU, demonstrating computational efficiency suitable for edge deployment in resource-constrained UAV environments. These results quantitatively demonstrate that the proposed feature-engineering approach combined with lightweight deep learning is highly viable for real-time threat mitigation in resource-constrained UAV networks. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue AI for Cybersecurity and Emerging Technologies for Secure Systems)
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31 pages, 2888 KB  
Article
Runtime Policy Enforcement for MCP-Based LLM Agents
by Shanshan Wang, Sizheng Zhu and Rende Li
Electronics 2026, 15(13), 2829; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics15132829 - 27 Jun 2026
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 1174
Abstract
Tool-calling LLM agents are vulnerable to indirect prompt injection: externally retrieved data can redirect tool calls without system-prompt access, and prompt-level defences leave three harm classes undefended (path traversal, user-guided exfiltration, high-frequency tool abuse). We present a Policy Enforcement Point (PEP) that intercepts [...] Read more.
Tool-calling LLM agents are vulnerable to indirect prompt injection: externally retrieved data can redirect tool calls without system-prompt access, and prompt-level defences leave three harm classes undefended (path traversal, user-guided exfiltration, high-frequency tool abuse). We present a Policy Enforcement Point (PEP) that intercepts at the tool-call boundary with declarative rules over a cross-step information-flow label system (source integrity, data sensitivity) and a synchronous SHA-256 hash-chained audit log. On a controlled dataset across four attack classes, the full system cuts the attack success rate (ASR) from 40.0% to 5.0% (deepseek-v4-pro, five repeats) versus 35.0% for the strongest prompt-only baseline; disabling cross-step label propagation raises the call-level false-negative rate by 26.4 points. The 30.0% task-level false-positive rate is dominated by by-design least-privilege capability-token denials, not rule false positives—an expanded 30-task benign set yields 0/30 rule false positives under scripted isolation. A conservative-DS mitigation (intent-taint) closes the constructed denied-read reconstruction blind-spot variant (ASR 100% to 0%) at no cost on standard workflows. The audit log detects all three tested tamper classes; the in-process enforcement overhead is sub-millisecond per call. Across four further backends, ASR drops under the full system, though LLaMA-3.3-70B retains 16.7% (a rule-coverage gap). A preliminary run over a real MCP stdio transport (an official filesystem server) shows the mechanism operates at a real boundary with a sub-millisecond execution-path increment. We frame these as mechanism-coverage evidence on a controlled benchmark, not a deployability claim for production MCP workloads. Code, data, and metrics are openly available in the replication repository. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue AI for Cybersecurity and Emerging Technologies for Secure Systems)
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18 pages, 947 KB  
Article
A Classifier with Unknown Pattern Recognition for Domain Name System Tunneling Detection in Dynamic Networks
by Huijuan Dong, Zengwei Zheng and Shenfei Pei
Electronics 2026, 15(3), 709; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics15030709 - 6 Feb 2026
Viewed by 724
Abstract
Domain Name System (DNS) tunneling, a stealthy attack that exploits DNS infrastructure, poses critical threats to dynamic networks and is evolving with emerging attack patterns. This study aims to accurately classify multi-pattern legitimate and malicious traffic and to identify previously unseen attack patterns. [...] Read more.
Domain Name System (DNS) tunneling, a stealthy attack that exploits DNS infrastructure, poses critical threats to dynamic networks and is evolving with emerging attack patterns. This study aims to accurately classify multi-pattern legitimate and malicious traffic and to identify previously unseen attack patterns. We focus on two core research questions: how to accurately classify known-pattern DNS queries and reliably identify unknown-pattern samples. The codified objective is to develop an unsupervised classification approach that integrates multi-pattern adaptation and the recognition of unknown patterns. We formalize the task as Emerging Pattern Classification and propose the Medium Neighbors Forest. It is a forest-based model that uses the “medium neighbor” mechanism and clustering to identify unknown patterns. Experiments verify that the proposed model effectively identifies unseen patterns, offering a new perspective for DNS tunneling detection. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue AI for Cybersecurity and Emerging Technologies for Secure Systems)
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