Novel Approaches for Deep Learning in Cybersecurity

A special issue of Electronics (ISSN 2079-9292). This special issue belongs to the section "Artificial Intelligence".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 15 July 2026 | Viewed by 1589

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Department of Cybersecurity, School of Science, Health and Criminal Justice, State University of New York, Canton, NY 13617, USA
Interests: machine learning; deep learning; sociable robots; security; affective computing; digital health; data analysis; healthcare systems

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Cybersecurity, School of Science, Health and Criminal Justice, State University of New York, Canton, NY 13617, USA
Interests: data security and privacy; data analysis; privacy enhancing technologies; usable security and privacy; public safety and education; social media; healthcare systems

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The increasing complexity of digital systems and the expanding attack surface of connected technologies demand innovative and intelligent approaches to cybersecurity. Deep learning, with its ability to model nonlinear and high-dimensional data patterns, has emerged as a powerful tool in identifying, mitigating, and predicting cyber threats across diverse application domains. This Special Issue aims to highlight recent advances and novel methodologies in applying deep learning to cybersecurity, focusing on solutions that improve the accuracy, scalability, and resilience of intelligent security systems. We are particularly interested in contributions that explore real-time threat detection, adversarial robustness, privacy-preserving AI, and secure architectures for emerging environments such as cloud, edge, and IoT ecosystems.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

  • Deep learning models for intrusion detection and malware classification;
  • Federated and privacy-preserving learning for cybersecurity;
  • Adversarial machine learning and defense mechanisms;
  • Secure biometric authentication and identity management;
  • Multimodal threat intelligence systems;
  • Explainable AI (XAI) in cybersecurity applications;
  • Applications of GNNs, transformers, and generative models in cyber defense.

Dr. Mehdi Ghayoumi
Dr. Kambiz Ghazinour
Guest Editors

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Keywords

  • deep learning for cybersecurity
  • AI-based threat detection
  • privacy-preserving machine learning
  • federated learning in security
  • intrusion detection systems (IDS)
  • adversarial machine learning
  • secure neural networks
  • biometric authentication
  • cyber-trust modeling
  • multimodal security analytics

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Published Papers (3 papers)

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Research

21 pages, 3941 KB  
Article
Explainable Prediction of Crowdfunding Success Using Hierarchical Attention Network
by SeungHun Lee, Muneeb A. Khan and Hyun-chul Kim
Electronics 2026, 15(3), 570; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics15030570 - 28 Jan 2026
Viewed by 110
Abstract
Crowdfunding has emerged as an alternative funding source among entrepreneurs, businesses, and industries. In recent years, research on machine learning-based project classification models has been conducted with the aim of predicting the success of crowdfunding campaigns, both for entrepreneurs and investors. However, most [...] Read more.
Crowdfunding has emerged as an alternative funding source among entrepreneurs, businesses, and industries. In recent years, research on machine learning-based project classification models has been conducted with the aim of predicting the success of crowdfunding campaigns, both for entrepreneurs and investors. However, most of the research has focused on classification approaches using non-content information such as project metadata, creators’ behavior, and social history, but there have been few attempts to use text content data per se, particularly in order to provide explanations and evidence for how the prediction decisions were made. To address this point, we propose to use a deep learning-based approach called Hierarchical Attention Network (HAN) to predict the success of crowdfunding campaigns and provide explanation and justification of the prediction decisions using attention weights. We collect publicly available data of crowdfunding campaigns and build our success prediction model with an accuracy of 86.38% and 87.29%, using an Updates section and backers’ comments in a Comments section, respectively. We also explore the feasibility of early success prediction during the funding period (up to 2 months), with as much as 80.99% accuracy in 1 to 2 months. Finally, we examine word and sentence attention weight scores to clarify key factors in predicting crowdfunding success. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Novel Approaches for Deep Learning in Cybersecurity)
22 pages, 504 KB  
Article
A Comparison of Cyber Intelligence Platforms in the Context of IoT Devices and Smart Homes
by Mohammed Rashed, Iván Torrejón-Del Viso and Ana I. González-Tablas
Electronics 2025, 14(22), 4503; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics14224503 - 18 Nov 2025
Viewed by 623
Abstract
Internet of Things (IoT) devices are increasingly deployed in homes and enterprises, yet they face a rising rate of cyberattacks. High-quality Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) is essential for data-driven, deep learning (DL)-based cybersecurity, as structured intelligence enables faster, automated detection. However, many CTI [...] Read more.
Internet of Things (IoT) devices are increasingly deployed in homes and enterprises, yet they face a rising rate of cyberattacks. High-quality Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) is essential for data-driven, deep learning (DL)-based cybersecurity, as structured intelligence enables faster, automated detection. However, many CTI platforms still use unstructured or non-standard formats, hindering integration with ML systems.This study compares CTI from one commercial platform (AlienVault OTX) and public vulnerability databases (NVD’s CVE and CPE) in the IoT/smart home context. We assess their adherence to the Structured Threat Information Expression (STIX) v2.1 standard and the quality and coverage of their intelligence. Using 6.2K IoT-related CTI objects, we conducted syntactic and semantic analyses. Results showed that OTX achieved full STIX compliance. Based on our coverage metric, OTX demonstrated high intelligence completeness, whereas the NVD sources showed partial contextual coverage. IoT threats exhibited an upward trend, with Network as the dominant attack vector and Gain Access as the most common objective. The limited use of STIX-standardized vocabulary reduced machine readability, constraining data-driven applications. Our findings inform the design and selection of CTI feeds for intelligent intrusion detection and automated defense systems. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Novel Approaches for Deep Learning in Cybersecurity)
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26 pages, 3558 KB  
Article
Avocado: An Interpretable Fine-Grained Intrusion Detection Model for Advanced Industrial Control Network Attacks
by Xin Liu, Tao Liu and Ning Hu
Electronics 2025, 14(21), 4233; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics14214233 - 29 Oct 2025
Viewed by 585
Abstract
Industrial control systems (ICS), as critical infrastructure supporting national operations, are increasingly threatened by sophisticated stealthy network attacks. These attacks often break malicious behaviors into multiple highly camouflaged packets, which are embedded into large-scale background traffic with low frequency, making them semantically and [...] Read more.
Industrial control systems (ICS), as critical infrastructure supporting national operations, are increasingly threatened by sophisticated stealthy network attacks. These attacks often break malicious behaviors into multiple highly camouflaged packets, which are embedded into large-scale background traffic with low frequency, making them semantically and temporally indistinguishable from normal traffic and thus evading traditional detection. Existing methods largely rely on flow-level statistics or long-sequence modeling, resulting in coarse detection granularity, high latency, and poor byte-level interpretability, falling short of industrial demands for real-time and actionable detection. To address these challenges, we propose Avocado, a fine-grained, multi-level intrusion detection model. Avocado’s core innovation lies in contextual flow-feature fusion: it models each packet jointly with its surrounding packet sequence, enabling independent abnormality detection and precise localization. Moreover, a shared-query multi-head self-attention mechanism is designed to quantify byte-level importance within packets. Experimental results show that Avocado significantly outperforms state-of-the-art flow-level methods on NGAS and CLIA-M221 datasets, improving packet-level detection ACC by 1.55% on average, and reducing FPR and FNR to 3.2%, 3.6% (NGAS), and 3.7%, 4.3% (CLIA-M221), respectively, demonstrating its superior performance in both detection and interpretability. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Novel Approaches for Deep Learning in Cybersecurity)
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