Artificial Intelligence in Effective Intrusion Detection for Clouds

A special issue of Network (ISSN 2673-8732).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 November 2026 | Viewed by 1721

Special Issue Editor


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Guest Editor
Faculty of Technology, School of Computing, University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth PO1 2UP, UK
Interests: machine learning with applications in cyber security (digital forensics; intrusion prevention detection and response; social engineering; OSINT; insider threats; malware and distributed denial of service attacks; AI application in cybersecurity)
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Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Cloud computing has revolutionized the way organizations manage and store data, offering unparalleled scalability, flexibility, and cost-efficiency. However, the widespread adoption of cloud services has also introduced new security challenges, including the risk of cyber attacks and data breaches. Intrusion detection systems (IDSs) play a critical role in protecting cloud infrastructures by monitoring and identifying malicious activities in real-time. Traditional IDS approaches, however, often struggle to keep up with the rapidly evolving nature of cyber threats.

To address these challenges, this Special Issue focuses on the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to enhance the effectiveness of intrusion detection in cloud environments. AI offers the promise of intelligent, adaptive, and autonomous IDS solutions capable of identifying and mitigating security breaches more effectively than traditional methods.

The goal of this Special Issue is to bring together researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to explore recent advances, challenges, and opportunities in AI-driven intrusion detection for clouds. We invite original research articles and review papers that contribute to the development of innovative AI-based IDS solutions for cloud security. Topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Novel AI algorithms and models for intrusion detection in cloud environments;
  • Integration of machine learning, deep learning, and data mining in IDS for clouds;
  • Adaptive and self-learning IDS systems for dynamic cloud architectures;
  • Big data analytics and anomaly detection for cloud security;
  • AI-driven threat intelligence and risk assessment in cloud infrastructures;
  • Performance evaluation and benchmarking of AI-based IDS solutions;
  • Privacy-preserving techniques and ethical considerations in AI-driven intrusion detection;
  • Case studies, practical implementations, and real-world applications of AI in cloud security.

You may choose our Joint Special Issue in Electronics.

Dr. Stavros Shiaeles
Guest Editor

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Keywords

  • artificial intelligence
  • intrusion detection
  • cloud computing
  • machine learning
  • deep learning
  • cybersecurity
  • network security
  • threat detection

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

24 pages, 1361 KB  
Article
Adaptive Decision-Level Intrusion Detection for Known and Zero-Day Attacks
by Joseph P. Mchina, Neema Mduma and Ramadhani S. Sinde
Network 2026, 6(2), 23; https://doi.org/10.3390/network6020023 - 9 Apr 2026
Viewed by 500
Abstract
Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) face increasing challenges from sophisticated cyber threats, particularly zero-day attacks that evade signature-based methods. While supervised learning is effective for known attack classification, it struggles with novel threats, whereas anomaly-based approaches suffer from high false positive rates and [...] Read more.
Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) face increasing challenges from sophisticated cyber threats, particularly zero-day attacks that evade signature-based methods. While supervised learning is effective for known attack classification, it struggles with novel threats, whereas anomaly-based approaches suffer from high false positive rates and unstable thresholds. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a decision-level adaptive intrusion-detection framework combining hierarchical CNN-based closed-set classification with autoencoder-based zero-day detection in a cascade architecture. The framework enables deployment-time adaptation by dynamically adjusting class-specific confidence thresholds and fusion parameters without model retraining. Experiments on the CSE-CIC-IDS2018 dataset demonstrate strong closed-set performance, achieving 98.98% accuracy and a macro-F1-score of 0.9342, with improved recall for minority attack classes under adaptive thresholding. Under a zero-day evaluation protocol in which Web_Attacks and Infiltration are excluded from training and validation, the proposed approach achieves an F1-score of 0.9319 while maintaining a low false positive rate of 0.0019. The framework is further evaluated on the Simulated University Network Environment (SUNE) dataset representing campus network traffic, achieving 96.18% closed-set accuracy and 97.54% accuracy in the integrated cascade setting. These results demonstrate that the proposed framework effectively balances minority attack detection, zero-day identification, and false-alarm control in dynamic and resource-constrained network environments. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Artificial Intelligence in Effective Intrusion Detection for Clouds)
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