Jul 2026· Journal of Applied Science and Technology Trends· Vol 7· 0 citations· 25 references
TL;DR
A deployment-minded pipeline that integrates JSON-aware canonicalization that standardizes benign representational variance while preserving attack-relevant semantics, with the largest reductions on JSON wrapping and on multi-step chains such as homoglyph ?
Abstract
Deep-learning detectors for web attacks perform strongly on clean data yet remain brittle to semantics-preserving obfuscations, especially in JSON centric API traffic where identical malicious intent can appear under varied encodings, Unicode confusables, whitespace/comment patterns, or JSON carrier forms. We present a deployment-minded pipeline that integrates: (i) JSON-aware canonicalization that standardizes benign representational variance while preserving attack-relevant semantics; (ii) multi-seed training of BiLSTM-Attention and CharCNN detectors; (iii) black-box robustness evaluation using a bounded reinforcement-learning (RL) adversary and per-mutator Attack Evasion Rate (AER); (iv) few-shot adversarial fine-tuning (FSAT) on curated hard cases; and (v) temperature scaling with per-class thresholds, together with cloud-style latency profiling. On a three-class corpus stratified into Train/Validation/Test = 173,872 / 37,258 / 37,259 and augmented with JSON-native payloads, an RL set (6,821 train / 2,882 holdout), and a few-shot set (n = 1,499; 48.3% JSON), the BiLSTM-Attention model with canonicalization achieves clean-test macro-F1 = 0.9879 ± 0.0007, precision = 0.9889 ± 0.0007, recall = 0.9871 ± 0.0007, and accuracy = 0.9875 ± 0.0007 across three seeds. For the selected robust configuration, per-class threshold calibration (0.4 / 0.6 / 0.6) yields validation macro-F1 = 0.9881. Canonicalization reduces AER across common mutator families, with the largest reductions on JSON wrapping and on multi-step chains such as homoglyph ? URL-encode ? whitespace. After FSAT, the calibrated canon_on model attains clean-test precision = 0.9891, recall = 0.9870, macro-F1 = 0.9880, and accuracy = 0.9877, while reaching RL-holdout precision = 1.0000, recall = 1.0000, F1 = 1.0000, and accuracy = 1.0000 against the evaluated bounded black-box RL attacker. Median latency at 8 KB is 79.6 ms (P95 95.8 ms), indicating practical feasibility for API-gateway deployment.
Large language models (LLMs) embedded in enterprise workflows cannot structurally distinguish legitimate instructions from adversarial ones in the same token stream, making prompt injection OWASP's top LLM risk for two consecutive editions a persistent threat across direct and indirect vectors. This paper presents PromptShield-RT, a layered, real-time, model-agnostic framework combining input normalization and provenance tagging, lexical-heuristic pattern matching, a statistical classifier, structural anomaly features, and calibrated risk fusion, with policy-driven mitigation (allow/sanitize/quarantine/block) and an explainable, adaptive-feedback mechanism for SOC workflows. We construct an original evaluation corpus, SynPI-Bench (n = 450, six categories), and a template-disjoint held-out generalization set (n = 31) with novel phrasings, obfuscation encodings, and adversarial hard-negative benign text. Using template-grouped 5-fold cross-validation, the fused pipeline achieves 92.4% accuracy (F1 = 0.930, AUC = 0.990), outperforming heuristic-only (57.0%) and naive-averaged (59.2%) baselines, while a lexical classifier reaches 85.9% with lower precision. We report a pronounced generalization gap on the held-out set (48.4% accuracy, 90% false-positive rate on hard negatives), quantifying a known limitation of surface-lexical defenses. The pipeline achieves sub-millisecond P95 latency (0.266 ms), within typical 50 ms enterprise SLAs. We situate PromptShield-RT relative to structural, architectural, and guardrail-product defenses, arguing for layered, defense-in-depth architectures, with reproducible code provided.
Fatimah Alhamzawi· Al-Noor Journal of Engineeri...· 0 citations
Modern services are awash in Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), yet most security pipelines end at pre-deployment testing using fuzzers and scanners. This leaves a run-time gap where payload obfuscation and other evolving request-visible misuse patterns outpace static rules and slow retraining cycles. We present HotPatchCaps, an expert-in-the-loop runtime framework that closes this gap by hot patching expert knowledge into a capsule architecture without retraining. HotPatchCaps fuses Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency (TF–IDF) statistics on request tokens with security cues such as parameter names, encodings, and payload substrings, and employs slot-controlled routing to amplify semantically relevant evidence into interpretable capsule activations. New rules arrive as lightweight runtime patches that can be injected on the fly, aligning with operational practice while preserving the generalization of learned models. We evaluated the CSIC 2010 dataset and the ATRDF 2023 dataset in both in-distribution and zero-day settings against classical machine learning (ML) and deep baselines. Experimental results demonstrate that HotPatchCaps consistently improves accuracy and recall at competitive precision and remains robust under label noise and schema drift. By turning expert knowledge into patchable capsule priors, HotPatchCaps provides a practical path from testing to on-call defence for API-centric systems.
Tong Li, Shicheng Wei, Wencheng Yang et al.· IEEE Transactions on Network...· 0 citations
Due to the lack of systematic evaluations, we are not yet able to determine which AI-based Windows malware detector to deploy in production, since existing evaluations (i) differ in terms of data used for both training and testing; (ii) do not consider temporal analysis to showcase whether models withstand the passage of time; (iii) avoid security evaluations with adversarial attacks that could highlight their brittleness against content-injection attacks; and (iv) neglect the computational requirements for deployment, risking slow inference on endpoints. For these reasons, we develop EXE-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark of AI-based Windows malware detectors. EXE-Bench assesses performance, temporal and adversarial robustness, and computational overhead, aggregating them into a single score for direct and fair model comparison. Through EXE-Bench, we highlight how evaluations conducted only after deployment are suboptimal and unable to provide a complete picture of their performance. In particular, through our analysis, we remark how much domain knowledge instilled through feature engineering is still extremely useful in this domain, resisting both time and adversarial attacks, in stark contrast with most of the deep networks that only excel right after deployment.
Andrea Ponte, Daniel Gibert, M. Kozák et al.· 0 citations
LLM serving is limited by provider-side resources: longer generations consume more GPU time, increase latency, and reduce throughput in multi-tenant systems. This creates a denial-of-service (DoS) risk, where at-tackers degrade service by inducing excessive generation. Prior work on LLM DoS primarily relies on adversarial perturbations that delay end-of-sequence termination. We show perturbations are often unnecessary: natural, benign-looking instructions that specify impractical and meaningless tasks can already trigger excessive generation. To study this overlooked vulnerability, we introduce NaturalSloth , an adversarial dataset of natural, instruction-based DoS prompts. Starting from a human-curated seed set spanning diverse attack categories, we design a multi-agent synthesis framework to scale the dataset while preserving malicious intent and increasing semantic diversity. Experiments across a wide range of proprietary and open-source LLMs show that NaturalSloth consistently induces excessive generation, with attack effectiveness further amplified when combined with jailbreak techniques. Our analysis also reveals significant limitations of existing defenses, highlighting the need for dedicated protections against natural DoS attacks. 1
Yiming Chen, Zexin Li, Xianghu Yue et al.· Annual Meeting of the Associ...· 0 citations
The Adversarial-Resilient Lightweight Random Forest (AR-LRF) model is proposed, combining controlled ensemble complexity with simulated adversarial perturbations applied during training to mitigate adversarial vulnerabilities.
A. Chaudhuri, M. B· Scientific Reports· 0 citations