Research Opportunities

Information for students interested in research projects

Available Research Projects

If you are interested in any of the following topics, please contact me with your CV and a brief statement of interest.

  1. A Dempster–Shafer, Fusion-Based Approach for Malware Detection

    A systematic comparison of DST implementation strategies for malware detection, focusing on uncertainty management and evidence fusion. Achieves low false positive rates (0.16%–3.19%).

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]
  2. ARM: Adaptive Rank-Based Mutation for Android Malware Detection

    Robust feature selection using a Genetic Algorithm with Rank-Based Adaptive Mutation (GA-RAM) to preserve semantically meaningful features against adversarial noise.

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]
  3. SNEL-DFF: Android malware detection using Siamese networks with ensemble learning

    Combines Siamese networks, deep forest feature extraction, and ensemble learning to handle complex Android application data, achieving 99% accuracy.

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]
  4. Mitigating Distribution Shift in Graph-Based Android Malware Classification

    Augments function call graphs with contextual features like function-level metadata and code embeddings from LLMs to boost performance by up to 8%.

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]
  5. Evasive Ransomware Attacks Using Low-level Behavioral Adversarial Examples

    Uses leaked Conti source code to manipulate runtime parameters (thread count, encryption ratio) to evade AI-based detection systems.

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]
  6. JPEG-Domain Malware Detection with Pretrained Lightweight Vision Transformer Model

    MalViT architecture operates directly in the JPEG frequency domain using DCT coefficients, offering 4.7x faster inference than MobileViT.

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]
  7. PRAU-GIN: GIN-based android malware classification with traffic refinement

    Leverages Graph Isomorphism Networks (GIN) and Label Spreading to filter benign background flows, achieving 99.54% accuracy.

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]
  8. Detection of Adversarial Examples by Adversarial Training: NIDS Study

    Examines the effectiveness of adversarial training in NIDS, highlighting limitations of feature-space perturbations versus raw traffic manipulations.

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]
  9. FedDPL: Federated Dynamic Prototype Learning for Privacy-Preserving Malware Analysis

    Integrates Federated Learning with adaptive, ensemble‑style K‑means to discover cluster structures without predefined K, preserving data privacy.

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]
  10. Towards Transparent Malware Detection With Granular Explainability

    Introduces Assembly Flow Graphs (AFGs) and Meta‑Coarsening for GNN‑based instruction‑level explainability in large-scale binary analysis.

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]
  11. An automated multi-scale and multi-contextual MobileNetv3 for IoT

    MSMC‑MobileNet uses SE attention and ASPP/FPP modules for multi‑scale feature extraction with reduced computational overhead via pruning.

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]
  12. A hierarchical deep learning framework with doubly regularized loss (DRBCE)

    A two-stage framework for binary detection and family classification using a novel loss function to handle class imbalance and training stability.

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]
  13. IMDP-HDL: Hybrid deep representation learning for Android Malware

    Uses a composite CBiLSTMSA architecture to capture spatial and temporal patterns, specifically targeting sophisticated evasion like dynamic code triggering.

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]
  14. γ-M2I: Image-based malware classification via feature spatial transformation

    A plug‑and‑play module that enhances STPM‑generated images through γ‑mapping, achieving up to 99.82% accuracy on Malimg.

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]
  15. Cross-Attention Feature Fusion for Interpretable Zero-Day Malware Detection

    Uses multi‑head cross‑attention for feature exchange and integrates Integrated Gradients, SHAP, and LIME for multi-method transparency.

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]
  16. Advanced AI-Driven Cybersecurity Solutions: Stacked Ensemble PDF Analysis

    A stacked ensemble model with PCA and LIME for detecting malicious PDF files, reaching 97% accuracy on the CIC‑Evasive dataset.

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]
  17. UIXPOSE: Mobile Malware Detection via Intention–Behaviour Discrepancy Analysis

    Compares user-facing 'intent' from the UI (via Vision-Language Models) with actual runtime behavior to spot hidden malicious activity.

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]
  18. Orchestrating machine learning models in a swarm architecture for IoT

    Swarm‑based Inline Machine Learning (SIML) using Gradient Boosting for real-time traffic analysis and policy-based blocking.

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]
  19. Embedding Space Gap Filling with Dynamically Generated Synthetic Samples

    Uses diffusion and WGAN-GP to fill semantic gaps in embedding space, rebalancing datasets adaptively during training for underrepresented malware behaviors.

    Status: Open for new student researchers
  20. Federated Learning for Robust Malware Detection under Noisy Labels and Malicious Sybils

    The work presents a Federated Learning pipeline for malware detection that remains reliable even when training data contains both accidental label noise and deliberate adversarial sybil attacks. It isolates malicious clients through cluster‑based scoring and repairs corrupted labels through semi‑supervised refinement, preserving high accuracy despite corruption levels reaching 80%.

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]
  21. Obfuscation-Resistant Feature Extraction for Macro-based Office Malware Detection

    This paper presents a malware detection method that uses Large Language Models to extract linguistic cues from Microsoft Office macros, enabling the identification of malicious behavior even under heavy obfuscation. It also contrasts this high‑precision but resource‑intensive approach with a faster statistical alternative, outlining a practical trade‑off for security analysts.

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]
  22. Real-Time Intrusion Detection Using Lightweight Neural Networks with Built-in Explainability Mechanisms

    Integrates compact neural architectures with built-in interpretability to achieve low-latency, accurate intrusion detection and transparent decision-making in resource-constrained IoT edge environments.

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]
  23. Trident: Improving Malware Detection with LLMs and Behavioral Features

    Combines static decision trees with LLM-generated behavioral rules and direct report analysis via majority voting to enhance detection robustness against concept drift.

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]
  24. Ensemble Learning Framework for Robust Malware Classification: Integrating Feature Optimized Voting Classifiers

    Utilizes an ensemble of Random Forest and Gradient Boosting with entropy-based feature selection to outperform traditional classifiers in malware detection accuracy and adaptability.

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]
  25. UAP4MA: Leveraging Multi-Agent Bandits to Generate Universal Adversarial Perturbations for Malware Attribution

    Introduces a multi-agent multi-armed bandit framework that collaboratively constructs functionality-preserving adversarial perturbations to significantly increase fooling rates against APT malware attribution models.

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]
  26. LCC-LLM: Leveraging Code-Centric Large Language Models for Malware Attribution

    Introduces a code-centric benchmark and a multi-layer retrieval-augmented LLM framework that integrates static analysis, verification, and curriculum-tuned models to improve malware attribution accuracy and reliability.

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]
  27. Gray-Box Poisoning of Continuous Malware Ingestion Pipelines

    Analyzes gray-box poisoning attacks using functionality-preserving binary manipulations and shows how subtle IAT injections degrade LightGBM detection while ensemble filtering mitigates up to 95.6% of poisoning attempts.

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]
  28. DNM-EWS: A DYNAMIC COMPLEX NETWORK FRAMEWORK FOR PROPAGATION MALWARE DETECTION AND EARLY WARNING

    Proposes a dynamic complex-network early warning system that uses temporal topology metrics and adaptive baselines to detect pre-propagation malware anomalies with low false positives and significant attack-scale reduction.

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]
  29. GCCM: Enhancing Generative Graph Prediction via Contrastive Consistency Model

    Introduces a contrastive consistency model that prevents shortcut collapse in diffusion-based graph prediction by adding negative pairs and feature perturbations to stabilize sampling and improve accuracy.

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]
  30. Evaluating Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Explainable Malware Analysis

    Evaluates how retrieval-augmented generation affects malware explanation quality and shows that external context often degrades LLM signal extraction when structured evidence is already sufficient.

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]
  31. Retrieval-Augmented Few-Shot Malware Detection via Binary Visualization and Vision–Language Embeddings

    Proposes a few-shot malware detection framework combining binary visualization, frozen vision–language embeddings, and similarity-based retrieval to enable adaptation without model retraining.

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]
  32. Quantifiable Uncertainty: A Stochastic Consensus Multi-Agent RAG Framework for Robust Malware Detection

    MAGMA decouples malware analysis into semantic retrieval and probabilistic verification, achieving a 98.4% detection rate via a stochastic consistency ensemble.

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]
  33. TUANDROMD-X: Advanced Entropy and Visual Analytics Dataset for Enhanced Malware Detection and Classification

    TUANDROMD-X is a multiclass malware dataset featuring visual and entropy-based static features to facilitate faster and more efficient machine learning detection.

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]
  34. Improving robustness and explainability of PE malware classifiers using GAN-Generated Synthetic Adversarial examples

    This study introduces ATS, a defense methodology augmenting standard adversarial training with CTGAN-generated synthetic examples, effectively improving PE malware classifier robustness without reducing clean accuracy.

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]
  35. MalElves: Reinforcement Learning-Driven Adversarial Example Generation for Evading Cross-Platform ELF Malware Detection

    A reinforcement learning framework named MalElves leverages a compact 21-dimensional state design and PPO-based reward shaping to generate functional cross-platform ELF malware adversarial examples.

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]
  36. Explainable Robustness Against Localized Malware Obfuscation: A Hybrid CNN-ViT Approach with Comparative Attention Analysis

    A hybrid CNN-ViT architecture achieves 93.8% baseline accuracy and 81.8% under localized noise by shifting its self-attention to persistent global payloads.

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]
  37. MalwarePT: A Binary-Level Foundation Model for Malware Analysis

    MalwarePT leverages a 'ModernBERT-style' encoder and byte-pair encoding to create a binary-level foundation model, significantly improving performance across multiple malware analysis tasks

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]
  38. Learning to Look Benign: Targeted Evasion of Malware Detectors via API Import Injection

    A strictly additive 'Conditional Variational Autoencoder' injects targeted benign API imports into malware, dropping detector recall from 87.5% to 30% while preserving functionality.

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]
  39. Multimodal Malware Detection under Obfuscated and Adversarial Attack Conditions Using ResNet-50 and MLP Encoders with Contrastive Learning and Adaptive Cross-Modal Fusion

    Combines ResNet-50 image embeddings and masked autoencoder MLP tabular features with adaptive cross-modal contrastive fusion to detect Android malware under adversarial and obfuscated conditions.

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]
  40. When GANs meet LLMs: Bridging the Feature-Problem space gap for efficient adversarial ML-based malware generation

    Couples GAN-generated adversarial feature vectors with GitHub Copilot to produce compilable malware binaries that successfully bypass ML-based detectors and commercial antivirus tools.

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]
  41. Negative-One-Day Malware Detection with Generative AI: A Stable Diffusion-Based Proactive Defense Framework

    Leverages diffusion-based generative models to synthesize future malware variants for training detectors before threats emerge, closing the zero-day protection gap.

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]
  42. SEED: Semi-supervised Continual MalwarE Detection for Tackling ConcEpt Drift on a BuDget

    Combines semi-supervised continual learning, active learning, and SVD-based representation pairing to achieve robust malware detection under limited labeling budgets with 40% AUT improvement.

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]
  43. Dual-Channel Mamba-Based Semantic–Behavioral Feature Learning with Prototype-Guided Zero-Shot Inference for Zero-Day Malware Detection

    Fuses static and dynamic malware features via dual Mamba encoders with prototype-guided zero-shot inference, achieving 96.01% accuracy and 88.93% zero-day detection at ~8ms latency.

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]
  44. Building an Adversarial Malware Dataset by Family and Type: Generation, Evasion, and Poisoning Evaluation

    Constructs 44,347 adversarial PE samples achieving 98.35% evasion against EMBER, showing 0.5% poisoned training data raises evasion rates from 26.1% to 92.8%.

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]
  45. Adversarial Vulnerability Under Temporal Concept Drift: A Longitudinal Study of Android Malware Detection

    Evaluates adversarial robustness across a decade of Android apps under three deployment protocols, finding temporal drift degrades clean and adversarial accuracy while expanding-window retraining partially mitigates loss.

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]
  46. "What is the Problem Space?" Defining Host-space Adversarial Perturbations against Network Intrusion Detection Systems

    Introduces host-space perturbations as a realistic adversarial constraint, demonstrating via literature review and experiments that ML-NIDS are evaded by minimal attacker-controlled input changes.

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]
  47. DevSecTrust: Standardising How We Measure Software Development Security

    Proposes a unified evaluation framework comparing Hipcheck and Scorecard metrics, revealing low correlation and foundational scoring inconsistencies that undermine software development security measurement reliability.

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]
  48. ARSNet: A Novel Malware Visualization Detection Method

    ARSNet integrates the BASA module with DHM loss to address class imbalance in visualization-based malware detection, achieving 98.6% accuracy and 23% minority recall improvement.

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]
  49. PE Malware Detection via Optimized Static Features and Ensemble Learning

    A two-level stacking ensemble using PE file structural features with entropy-based selection achieves 99.37% detection accuracy and 1500 files per second throughput.

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]
  50. Transformer-based deep learning framework for malware detection in Linux environments using structured process-level features

    A single-encoder Transformer employing multi-head self-attention on Linux process-level kernel telemetry achieves a 0.99 F1-score, outperforming CNN and LSTM baselines by up to 32%.

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]
  51. Enhanced android malware classification using multi machine learning models and generative adversarial network

    This study utilizes multiple machine learning models combined with generative adversarial networks to enhance classification accuracy and robustness against Android malware attacks.

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]
  52. FEDWIDroid: Android Malware Classification Based on Feature Embedding, Dynamic Weighting, and Interaction

    This paper proposes FEDWIDroid, utilizing feature embedding, gating, and attention mechanisms for dynamic weighting to accurately classify Android malware from binary features.

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]
  53. AMD-FCG: An Enhanced Function Call Graph Dataset with Integrated Topological Features for Malware Detection and Classification

    This work introduces AMD-FCG, a 30,000-instance dataset integrating function call graphs and topological features to streamline static malware classification across fifty-one classes.

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]
  54. ViG-fuse: efficient cross-attentive fusion of visual and graph representations for multi-view android malware classification

    This paper proposes a multi-view framework using a linear cross-attention mechanism to fuse visual and graph representations, significantly improving Android malware detection efficiency.

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]
  55. Enhancing Malware Detection with Generative AI: Using Variational Autoencoders to Boost Machine Learning Classifiers' Performance

    This study leverages variational autoencoders to generate high-quality synthetic data, effectively mitigating malware data scarcity and enhancing the classification accuracy of baseline machine learning models.

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]
  56. Federated ConvNeXt-swin temporal fusion network for malware and botnet detection in IoT systems

    This article introduces a decentralized framework combining localized convolutions with temporal attention mechanisms to ensure private, accurate malware and botnet classification in heterogeneous IoT networks.

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]
  57. The Sound of Malware: A Memory Forensics Approach for Android Malware Analysis via Audio Signals

    This research maps bytecode and volatile memory snapshots into audio waveforms to capture low-level structural signal patterns, achieving robust malware detection without semantic feature engineering.

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]
  58. FDM: A Framework for Decision-making to build ML-based Malware detection systems

    This work introduces a multi-criteria scoring system that evaluates operational metrics against constraints to systematically rank and recommend machine learning configurations for malware detection.

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]
  59. Asm2Src-LLMEval: A GenAI Pipeline for Multi-Metric Assessment of LLMs in Program Translation and Analysis

    This work introduces a comprehensive evaluation framework assessing five large language models across lexical, semantic, fluency, and efficiency metrics during assembly-to-source program translation.

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]
  60. ProtoMal: Prototype-Guided Dual-Branch Continual Learning for Robust Android Malware Detection

    This paper introduces a dual-branch framework utilizing a frozen stability branch, a trainable plasticity branch, and median-based prototype learning to mitigate catastrophic forgetting under concept drift.

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]
  61. XAI-1DSig: Explainable and Robust 1D Signal-Based IoT Malware Classification

    This paper introduces a hybrid CNN-BiLSTM framework mapping malware byte sequences to 1D signals, integrating SHAP explanations and adversarial training to maximize robustness and transparency.

    Status: Open for new student researchers | [Foundational Paper]

Mentorship & Advising