Searcharxiv⌕ Search

arXiv subjects

Mst Eshita Khatun

Publications and source records attributed to Mst Eshita Khatun.

9 recordsLinked to original sources

Toward an Empirical Probabilistic Risk Manifestation Model of Organizational Cybersecurity in SMEs

In this paper, we present a cross-layer empirical study of organizational cybersecurity risk in Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), analyzing 281 validated security findings from 22 real-world SME cybersecurity assessments conducted over two years through a pro bono university cybersecurity clinic. We first identify recurring organizational security functions through iterative thematic coding, then estimate an empirical Risk Manifestation Model linking these functions to exposure conditions, attack mechanisms, and cybersecurity outcomes, and use probability propagation to identify dominant risk pathways. The model characterizes empirical associations observed in this sample rather than causal or predictive relationships. Our analysis identifies eight organizational security functions associated with two exposure conditions, five attack mechanisms, and six outcome categories. Across most functions, the dominant pathway follows asset exposure to credential compromise to unauthorized access, whereas infrastructure and network security primarily propagates through network exposure; these pathways remain stable under leave-one-organization-out analysis. Finally, we evaluate whether SME cybersecurity assessments can be simplified while preserving meaningful security coverage. Retaining six functions reduces assessment burden by 24% while preserving 97% of critical findings and 92% of risk-pathway coverage, a security-oriented reduction, while retaining five functions reduces burden by 45% while preserving 89% of critical findings and 85% of risk-pathway coverage, a more efficiency-oriented alternative.

cs.CR↗

An Evidence-First Multi-LLM Framework for Auditable Critical-Infrastructure Dependency Modeling

Critical-infrastructure knowledge is distributed across heterogeneous, incomplete, and weakly structured evidence, making dependency models difficult to construct automatically and difficult to trust. Large language models (LLMs) can extract structured knowledge from such evidence, but direct LLM-to-graph generation risks unsupported relationships, inconsistent terminology, incorrect entity identities, and erroneous dependency endpoints. We present an evidence-first multi-LLM framework for constructing Infrastructure Knowledge Bases (IKBs) and Infrastructure Dependency Graphs (IDGs) from heterogeneous infrastructure documentation. Multiple open-weight LLMs independently extract candidate entities and dependencies from normalized evidence, after which the framework separates evidence verification, ontology grounding, entity resolution, dependency alignment, validation, fusion, and human review. Evidence support, ontology reconciliation, endpoint resolution, model agreement, and human validation remain distinct states, while provenance and unresolved cases are preserved throughout. The validated IKB is then projected deterministically into the IDG without introducing new LLM-generated knowledge. Evaluation in nine infrastructure projects shows that entity recovery achieves substantially higher recall than complete directed dependency recovery and that canonical endpoint resolution is a major constraint in dependency construction. Cross-model overlap is also much lower for dependencies than for entities, indicating that the models often produce non-overlapping candidate assertions rather than a stable majority consensus. These findings support an auditable evidence-to-IKB-to-IDG process in which uncertainty is preserved and resolved progressively rather than collapsed into a single confidence or voting decision.

cs.CR↗

A Measurement Study of AI-Environment Realism Gaps in Malware-Analysis Sandboxes

Sandboxing remains a core technique for observing suspicious program behavior, yet environment-aware malware increasingly suppresses execution when analysis is suspected. Prior generations of sandbox evasion focused on virtualization artifacts, timing discrepancies, and wear-and-tear realism. In this paper, we present the first systematic measurement study of AI-environment artifacts as a new sandbox-evasion surface. We operationalize this realism gap through AIprint, a probe framework that captures persistent artifacts left behind by AI-capable software ecosystems, including AI-assistant configuration directories, model caches, environment variables, local inference services, and package dependencies. We systematically extract 450 unique artifacts from 284 open-source AI projects on GitHub, compile them into unprivileged Windows probes, and evaluate them across seven commercial and open-source sandbox backends together with three AI-capable reference hosts. Our results show that traditional VM-detection baselines fail to reliably distinguish real AI-capable systems from modern sandboxes, whereas twelve AI-environment artifacts appear on the reference hosts and on none of the evaluated backends. A controlled 214-step installation experiment establishes a causal relationship between AI tool and package installation and measurable AI-environment artifact accumulation, while adaptive spoofing experiments reveal a fundamental operational asymmetry: reproducing convincing AI software environments is substantially more expensive than detecting shallow spoofing.

cs.CR↗

Disclosure Divergence: Measuring Privacy Policy and Data Safety Misalignment at Scale

With the rapid growth of mobile applications, user data privacy has become an increasing concern. While privacy policies describe how apps collect and share data, platforms such as Google Play provide Data Safety labels intended to summarize these practices. Because these disclosure channels are declared separately, they may present inconsistent representations of app data practices, creating uncertainty for users and regulators. In this work, we conducted a large-scale empirical study of disclosure consistency across 6,051 Android apps. Using an LLM-based extraction framework and a unified schema over 14 Google Play data categories and two operations (collection and sharing), we measure per-app and per-category consistency and introduce a sensitivity-weighted risk score that emphasizes high-risk data types. We find that misalignment disproportionately affects sensitive categories such as personal information and device identifiers, with sharing disclosures exhibiting lower consistency than collection disclosures. Elevated privac risk is concentrated in app categories associated with persistent monitoring and communication. Overall, our findings highlight structural gaps in current disclosure mechanisms and underscore the need for stronger verification and greater transparency in platform-level privacy reporting.

cs.CR↗

A Large Language Model Approach to Generating Bypass Rules for Malware Evasion in Analysis Sandbox

Sandbox evasion remains a critical challenge for automated malware analysis, as modern malware employs environment checks to detect analysis platforms and suppress malicious behavior. Existing approaches rely on manually crafted bypass rules that require deep reverse engineering of each evasion mechanism -an approach that cannot scale against rapidly evolving evasion techniques. In this paper, we leverage large language models (LLMs) to automatically generate YARA rules that bypass evasion checks in sandbox environments. We propose ABLE, which analyzes execution traces from malware terminated due to potentially evasive behavior and employs multiple reasoning strategies to generate targeted bypass rules. To address syntactic errors and improve the efficacy of the bypass rules in the LLM outputs, we introduce an auto-sanitization pipeline and feedback-driven iterative refinement. We evaluate ABLE on 334 real-world malware samples across four open-weight LLMs. ABLE achieves a 79% bypass success rate, with iterative refinement contributing 29.5% of successful cases. Compared to existing analysis platforms, ABLE identifies 47% more malware family classifications and exposes previously hidden behaviors.

cs.CR↗

AndroByte: LLM-Driven Privacy Analysis through Bytecode Summarization and Dynamic Dataflow Call Graph Generation

With the exponential growth in mobile applications, protecting user privacy has become even more crucial. Android applications are often known for collecting, storing, and sharing sensitive user information such as contacts, location, camera, and microphone data often without the user's clear consent or awareness raising significant privacy risks and exposure. In the context of privacy assessment, dataflow analysis is particularly valuable for identifying data usage and potential leaks. Traditionally, this type of analysis has relied on formal methods, heuristics, and rule-based matching. However, these techniques are often complex to implement and prone to errors, such as taint explosion for large programs. Moreover, most existing Android dataflow analysis methods depend heavily on predefined list of sinks, limiting their flexibility and scalability. To address the limitations of these existing techniques, we propose AndroByte, an AI-driven privacy analysis tool that leverages LLM reasoning on bytecode summarization to dynamically generate accurate and explainable dataflow call graphs from static code analysis. AndroByte achieves a significant F\b{eta}-Score of 89% in generating dynamic dataflow call graphs on the fly, outperforming the effectiveness of traditional tools like FlowDroid and Amandroid in leak detection without relying on predefined propagation rules or sink lists. Moreover, AndroByte's iterative bytecode summarization provides comprehensive and explainable insights into dataflow and leak detection, achieving high, quantifiable scores based on the G-Eval metric.

cs.CR↗

Leveraging Big Data Frameworks for Spam Detection in Amazon Reviews

In this digital era, online shopping is common practice in our daily lives. Product reviews significantly influence consumer buying behavior and help establish buyer trust. However, the prevalence of fraudulent reviews undermines this trust by potentially misleading consumers and damaging the reputations of the sellers. This research addresses this pressing issue by employing advanced big data analytics and machine learning approaches on a substantial dataset of Amazon product reviews. The primary objective is to detect and classify spam reviews accurately so that it enhances the authenticity of the review. Using a scalable big data framework, we efficiently process and analyze a large scale of review data, extracting key features indicative of fraudulent behavior. Our study illustrates the utility of various machine learning classifiers in detecting spam reviews, with Logistic Regression achieving an accuracy of 90.35%, thus contributing to a more trustworthy and transparent online shopping environment.

cs.LG↗

Exploring Large Language Models for Semantic Analysis and Categorization of Android Malware

Malware analysis is a complex process of examining and evaluating malicious software's functionality, origin, and potential impact. This arduous process typically involves dissecting the software to understand its components, infection vector, propagation mechanism, and payload. Over the years, deep reverse engineering of malware has become increasingly tedious, mainly due to modern malicious codebases' fast evolution and sophistication. Essentially, analysts are tasked with identifying the elusive needle in the haystack within the complexities of zero-day malware, all while under tight time constraints. Thus, in this paper, we explore leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) for semantic malware analysis to expedite the analysis of known and novel samples. Built on GPT-4o-mini model, \msp is designed to augment malware analysis for Android through a hierarchical-tiered summarization chain and strategic prompt engineering. Additionally, \msp performs malware categorization, distinguishing potential malware from benign applications, thereby saving time during the malware reverse engineering process. Despite not being fine-tuned for Android malware analysis, we demonstrate that through optimized and advanced prompt engineering \msp can achieve up to 77% classification accuracy while providing highly robust summaries at functional, class, and package levels. In addition, leveraging the backward tracing of the summaries from package to function levels allowed us to pinpoint the precise code snippets responsible for malicious behavior.

cs.CR↗

Impact of COVID-19 post lockdown on eating habits and lifestyle changes among university students in Bangladesh: a web based cross sectional study

Background:Since the confinement of the lockdown, universities transferred their teaching and learning activities in online as an all-out intention to prevent the transmission of the infection. This study aimed to determine the significant changes in food habits, physical activity, sleeping hours, shopping habits, Internet use time and mental status of the students and investigate the associations between variables. Methods:The study participants were 307 Undergraduate students, between 18 and 25 years of age completed a structured questionnaire from January 3, 2022 to February 13, 2022. The questionnaire included demographic information of the students, questionnaire of dietary pattern, physical activity, sleep quality index, Shopping practice and Internet use time.Chi-square tests were used to associate the baseline information with lifestyle changes in post lockdown. Results:The study reveals that 21.5% of respondents gained weight, 23.8% lost their weight and 41.7% controlled their weight. Eating of homemade food decreased after lockdown 76.5% and eating of restaurant food increased after lockdown 23.5%. A number of major meals 3-4 meals per day decreased after lockdown 61.9%. Physical exercise significantly increased after lockdown (p=0.001). Sleeping hours per day significantly decreased after lockdown (p=0.001), sleep quality was almost the same and energy level increased more in post lockdown. Respondents felt mentally tired after lockdown 60.9%. Respondents spending time on the Internet in chat rooms was 88.3%. Conclusions: This study represents the significant impact on food habits, mental health, and daily routine of students after lockdown, suggesting that we should maintain a balanced diet, physical exercise to sleep quality and mental health.

cs.CY↗