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Enkeleda Bardhi

Publications and source records attributed to Enkeleda Bardhi.

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Beyond the Syntax: Do Security Experts Trust LLMs for NIDS Rule Engineering?

As network threats evolve, manual NIDS rule engineering has become a critical operational bottleneck. While Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise for automating this process, their ability to produce production-ready rules remains unvalidated. This paper presents a human-centered investigation into LLM-based NIDS rule engineering, formalizing a grounded generation framework and evaluating it through a user study with 10 domain experts. Our evaluation reveals a syntax-semantics paradox: although LLMs generate syntactically correct rules, experts find them only partially deployable due to low specificity and logic hallucinations in 12% of cases. While the system received a favorable SUS score of 67, practitioners remain skeptical of its autonomous capabilities, viewing LLMs as support tools for drafting and verification rather than independent generators. Finally, our statistical analysis indicates that while large-scale models ($\geq 70B$) consistently produce syntactically valid rules, small models ($\leq 4B$) are largely ineffective for IDS rule generation.

cs.CR

SoK: Harmonizing Attack Graphs and Intrusion Detection Systems

Detecting and responding to cyber attacks is increasingly difficult as high-volume, complex network traffic allows threats to remain concealed. While Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) identify anomalous behavior, Attack Graphs (AGs) serve as the primary threat model for analyzing attacker strategies and informing any response. Despite the conceptual connection being recognized in early research, the field of AG and IDS integration lacks a common structure. This paper presents the first systematic analysis of AG-IDS integration, reviewing a 73 comprehensive works in literature. We introduce a novel taxonomy revealing that current research is dominated by specialized, single-purpose integrations, such as using AGs to filter IDS false positives or using IDS alerts to prune AGs. Our analysis highlights a critical gap: the absence of a unifying framework that treats IDSs and AGs as a cohesive, integrated system. To address this gap, we propose a formal AG-IDS lifecycle. This framework establishes a continuous feedback loop where IDSs refine the accuracy of AG models, and those updated models, in turn, enhance IDS detection capabilities. We provide a proof-of-concept implementation demonstrating the practical advantages of this lifecycle for threat detection and incident response. Finally, we conclude by elaborating on significant opportunities for future development within the AG-IDS domain.

cs.CR

Security and Privacy of IP-ICN Coexistence: A Comprehensive Survey

Today Internet is experiencing a massive number of users with a continuously increasing need for data, which is the leading cause of introduced limitations among security and privacy issues. To overcome these limitations, a shift from host-centric to data-centric is proposed, and in this context, Information-Centric Networking (ICN) represents a promising solution. Nevertheless, unsettling the current Internet network layer, i.e., Internet Protocol (IP), with ICN is a challenging, expensive task since it requires worldwide coordination among Internet Service Providers (ISPs), backbone, and Autonomous Services (AS). Therefore, researchers foresee that the replacement process of the current Internet will transition through the coexistence of IP and ICN. In this perspective, novel architectures combine IP and ICN protocols. However, only a few of the proposed architectures place the security-by-design feature. Therefore, this article provides the first comprehensive Security and Privacy (SP) analysis of the state-of-the-art IP-ICN coexistence architectures by horizontally comparing the SP features among three deployment approaches, i.e., overlay, underlay, and hybrid, and vertically comparing among the ten considered SP features. Lastly, the article sheds light on the open issues and possible future directions for IP-ICN coexistence. Our analysis shows that most architectures fail to provide several SP features, including data and traffic flow confidentiality, availability, and anonymity of communication. Thus, this article shows the secure combination of current and future protocol stacks during the coexistence phase that the Internet will definitely walk across.

cs.CR