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Applications of Deep Learning in Cyber Threat Detection

A special issue of Electronics (ISSN 2079-9292). This special issue belongs to the section "Computer Science & Engineering".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (15 October 2025) | Viewed by 10851

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Computer and Information Technology Department, Purdue University in Indianapolis, Indianapolis, IN 46222, USA
Interests: explainable AI for network intrusion detection
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Management Science & Information Systems, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK 74078, USA
Interests: natural language processing; AI; information retrieval; health informatics; security

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The exponential growth of network intrusions and cyberattacks poses a significant threat to critical infrastructure across various sectors (including power, autonomous driving, IoT systems, and among others). This growth necessitates the development of advanced artificial intelligence techniques for cyber threat detection where securing current systems and networks against such threats will safeguard computer network systems against malicious activities, initiated by internal users or external infiltrators.

With recent advancements in deep learning over the past decade, this design paradigm has paved the way for the development of AI models that are capable of automatically detecting cyber intrusions. The current trend is developing AI-based systems that have both strong classification accuracy (leveraging various AI algorithms) while providing insights about their behavior and reasoning.

To achieve such a goal, interdisciplinary areas of research are needed (including using single deep learning methods and ensemble techniques for enhancing the accuracy of cyber threat detection, leveraging explainable AI for understanding the decision-making of these deep learning cyber threat detection models, and testing the efficiency and robustness of the developed deep learning-based threat detection methods).

The Special Issue focuses on the discussion of emerging solutions suitable for accomplishing efficient and reliable security technologies that leverage deep learning approaches. Potential topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Deep learning methods for advanced network intrusion detection;
  • Deep learning-based ensemble learning methods for cyber threat detection;
  • Explainable AI for explaining black-box deep learning methods in network intrusion detection;
  • Efficiency analysis and optimization of deep learning methods for cyber threat detection;
  • Deep learning methods for detecting threats to Internet-of-things (IoT) networks;
  • Feature selection for enhancing performance of deep learning methods for cyberthreat detection;
  • Evaluation frameworks for current deep learning methods for cyber threat detection;
  • Reliability of deep learning-based cyber threat detection methods;
  • Adversarial attacks on deep neural networks for cyber threat detection.

We look forward to receiving your contributions. 

Dr. Mustafa Abdallah
Dr. Xiao Luo
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Keywords

  • deep learning
  • network security
  • intrusion detection
  • explainable AI
  • IoT
  • deep neural networks
  • ensemble learning
  • feature selection
  • adversarial attacks on DNNs
  • cyber security

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Published Papers (3 papers)

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Research

19 pages, 1781 KB  
Article
HiSeq-TCN: High-Dimensional Feature Sequence Modeling and Few-Shot Reinforcement Learning for Intrusion Detection
by Yadong Pei, Yanfei Tan, Wei Gao, Fangwei Li and Mingyue Wang
Electronics 2025, 14(21), 4168; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics14214168 - 25 Oct 2025
Viewed by 859
Abstract
Intrusion detection is essential to cybersecurity. However, the curse of dimensionality and class imbalance limit detection accuracy and impede the identification of rare attacks. To address these challenges, this paper proposes the high-dimensional feature sequence temporal convolutional network (HiSeq-TCN) for intrusion detection. The [...] Read more.
Intrusion detection is essential to cybersecurity. However, the curse of dimensionality and class imbalance limit detection accuracy and impede the identification of rare attacks. To address these challenges, this paper proposes the high-dimensional feature sequence temporal convolutional network (HiSeq-TCN) for intrusion detection. The proposed HiSeq-TCN transforms high-dimensional feature vectors into pseudo-temporal sequences, enabling the network to capture contextual dependencies across feature dimensions. This enhances feature representation and detection robustness. In addition, a few-shot reinforcement strategy adaptively assigns larger loss weights to minority classes, mitigating class imbalance and improving the recognition of rare attacks. Experiments on the NSL-KDD dataset show that HiSeq-TCN achieves an overall accuracy of 99.44%, outperforming support vector machines, deep neural networks, and long short-term memory models. More importantly, it significantly improves the detection of rare attack types such as remote-to-local and user-to-root attacks. These results highlight the potential of HiSeq-TCN for robust and reliable intrusion detection in practical cybersecurity environments. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Applications of Deep Learning in Cyber Threat Detection)
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17 pages, 3470 KB  
Article
Identifying Similar Users Between Dark Web and Surface Web Using BERTopic and Authorship Attribution
by Gun-Yoon Shin, Dong-Wook Kim, SungJin Park, A-ran Park, Younghwan Kim and Myung-Mook Han
Electronics 2025, 14(1), 148; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics14010148 - 2 Jan 2025
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 2916
Abstract
The dark web is a part of the deep web that ensures anonymity to users, thus facilitating various malicious activities, such as the sales of drugs, firearms, and personal information or the dissemination of malware and cyberattack tools. These activities extend beyond the [...] Read more.
The dark web is a part of the deep web that ensures anonymity to users, thus facilitating various malicious activities, such as the sales of drugs, firearms, and personal information or the dissemination of malware and cyberattack tools. These activities extend beyond the dark web and have negative effects on the surface web, which is commonly accessed by internet users. Recent studies on the dark web are limited to the detection and classification of specific malicious activities; that is, they cannot trace or identify the authors of dark web content or the source of a given information Therefore, we herein propose a method for identifying similar authors between the surface and dark webs using BERTopic and authorship attribution. We applied BERTopic to the surface and dark webs to extract previously unidentified topics and measured the similarity between the topics to detect similar topics between the two webs. In addition, we applied authorship attribution to the contents written by the authors of similar topics to extract the unique author characteristics. The similarity between the authors was measured to identify authors with similar characteristics. Thus, we identified authors who had written contents on similar topics on both the surface and dark webs as well as authors who are simultaneously active on both webs. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Applications of Deep Learning in Cyber Threat Detection)
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18 pages, 4942 KB  
Article
Unsupervised Anomaly Detection and Explanation in Network Traffic with Transformers
by André Kummerow, Esrom Abrha, Markus Eisenbach and Dennis Rösch
Electronics 2024, 13(22), 4570; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics13224570 - 20 Nov 2024
Cited by 8 | Viewed by 6141
Abstract
Deep learning-based autoencoders represent a promising technology for use in network-based attack detection systems. They offer significant benefits in managing unknown network traces or novel attack signatures. Specifically, in the context of critical infrastructures, such as power supply systems, AI-based intrusion detection systems [...] Read more.
Deep learning-based autoencoders represent a promising technology for use in network-based attack detection systems. They offer significant benefits in managing unknown network traces or novel attack signatures. Specifically, in the context of critical infrastructures, such as power supply systems, AI-based intrusion detection systems must meet stringent requirements concerning model accuracy and trustworthiness. For the intrusion response, the activation of suitable countermeasures can greatly benefit from additional transparency information (e.g., attack causes). Transformers represent the state of the art for learning from sequential data and provide important model insights through the widespread use of attention mechanisms. This paper introduces a two-stage transformer-based autoencoder for learning meaningful information from network traffic at the packet and sequence level. Based on this, we present a sequential attention weight perturbation method to explain benign and malicious network packets. We evaluate our method against benchmark models and expert-based explanations using the CIC-IDS-2017 benchmark dataset. The results show promising results in terms of detecting and explaining FTP and SSH brute-force attacks, highly outperforming the results of the benchmark model. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Applications of Deep Learning in Cyber Threat Detection)
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