Jeffrey C Kimmell

Harikha Manthena, Shaghayegh Shajarian, Jeffrey Kimmell et al.

Machine learning (ML) has rapidly advanced in recent years, revolutionizing fields such as finance, medicine, and cybersecurity. In malware detection, ML-based approaches have demonstrated high accuracy; however, their lack of transparency poses a significant challenge. Traditional black-box models often fail to provide interpretable justifications for their predictions, limiting their adoption in security-critical environments where understanding the reasoning behind a detection is essential for threat mitigation and response. Explainable AI (XAI) addresses this gap by enhancing model interpretability while maintaining strong detection capabilities. This survey presents a comprehensive review of state-of-the-art ML techniques for malware analysis, with a specific focus on explainability methods. We examine existing XAI frameworks, their application in malware classification and detection, and the challenges associated with making malware detection models more interpretable. Additionally, we explore recent advancements and highlight open research challenges in the field of explainable malware analysis. By providing a structured overview of XAI-driven malware detection approaches, this survey serves as a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners seeking to bridge the gap between ML performance and explainability in cybersecurity.

Mary Adkisson, Jeffrey C Kimmel, Maanak Gupta et al.

The inclusion of Internet of Things (IoT) devices is growing rapidly in all application domains. Smart Farming supports devices connected, and with the support of Internet, cloud or edge computing infrastructure provide remote control of watering and fertilization, real time monitoring of farm conditions, and provide solutions to more sustainable practices. This could involve using irrigation systems only when the detected soil moisture level is low or stop when the plant reaches a sufficient level of soil moisture content. These improvements to efficiency and ease of use come with added risks to security and privacy. Cyber attacks in large coordinated manner can disrupt economy of agriculture-dependent nations. To the sensors in the system, an attack may appear as anomalous behaviour. In this context, there are possibilities of anomalies generated due to faulty hardware, issues in network connectivity (if present), or simply abrupt changes to the environment due to weather, human accident, or other unforeseen circumstances. To make such systems more secure, it is imperative to detect such data discrepancies, and trigger appropriate mitigation mechanisms. In this paper, we propose an anomaly detection model for Smart Farming using an unsupervised Autoencoder machine learning model. We chose to use an Autoencoder because it encodes and decodes data and attempts to ignore outliers. When it encounters anomalous data the result will be a high reconstruction loss value, signaling that this data was not like the rest. Our model was trained and tested on data collected from our designed greenhouse test-bed. Proposed Autoencoder model based anomaly detection achieved 98.98% and took 262 seconds to train and has a detection time of .0585 seconds.

Jeffrey C Kimmell, Mahmoud Abdelsalam, Maanak Gupta

The variety of services and functionality offered by various cloud service providers (CSP) have exploded lately. Utilizing such services has created numerous opportunities for enterprises infrastructure to become cloud-based and, in turn, assisted the enterprises to easily and flexibly offer services to their customers. The practice of renting out access to servers to clients for computing and storage purposes is known as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). The popularity of IaaS has led to serious and critical concerns with respect to the cyber security and privacy. In particular, malware is often leveraged by malicious entities against cloud services to compromise sensitive data or to obstruct their functionality. In response to this growing menace, malware detection for cloud environments has become a widely researched topic with numerous methods being proposed and deployed. In this paper, we present online malware detection based on process level performance metrics, and analyze the effectiveness of different baseline machine learning models including, Support Vector Classifier (SVC), Random Forest Classifier (RFC), KNearest Neighbor (KNN), Gradient Boosted Classifier (GBC), Gaussian Naive Bayes (GNB) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). Our analysis conclude that neural network models can most accurately detect the impact malware have on the process level features of virtual machines in the cloud, and therefore are best suited to detect them. Our models were trained, validated, and tested by using a dataset of 40,680 malicious and benign samples. The dataset was complied by running different families of malware (collected from VirusTotal) in a live cloud environment and collecting the process level features.