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Saeed Valizadeh

Publications and source records attributed to Saeed Valizadeh.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

Large Language Models (LLMs) and Generative AI in Cybersecurity and Privacy: A Survey of Dual-Use Risks, AI-Generated Malware, Explainability, and Defensive Strategies

Large Language Models (LLMs) and generative AI (GenAI) systems, such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, LLaMA, Copilot, Stable Diffusion by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Stability AI, respectively, are revolutionizing cybersecurity, enabling both automated defense and sophisticated attacks. These technologies power real-time threat detection, phishing defense, secure code generation, and vulnerability exploitation at unprecedented scales. Following a rapid surge where LLM-generated malware grew to account for an estimated 50% of detected threats by 2025, up from just 2% in 2021, navigating this highly automated threat landscape in 2026 demands next-generation security frameworks. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the beneficial and malicious applications of LLMs in cybersecurity, including zero-day detection, DevSecOps, federated learning, synthetic content analysis, and explainable AI (XAI). Drawing on a review of over 70 academic papers, industry reports, and technical documents, this work synthesizes insights from real-world case studies across platforms like Google Play Protect, Microsoft Defender, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Apple App Store, OpenAI Plugin Stores, Hugging Face Spaces, and GitHub, alongside emerging initiatives like the SAFE Framework and AI-driven anomaly detection. We conclude with practical recommendations for responsible and transparent LLM deployment and trustworthy AI, including model watermarking, adversarial defense, and cross-industry collaboration, setting a new benchmark for rigorous, holistic cybersecurity research at the intersection of AI and threat defense, and offering a roadmap for secure, scalable LLM systems that serves as a critical reference for researchers, engineers, and security leaders navigating the complex challenges of AI-driven cybersecurity.

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Trustworthy AI LLM Scalability Risk Index (LSRI): A Cybersecurity Framework Assessing Agentic-AI Security & Software Model Supply Chain Safety Boosting AI-Generated Malware Defense & Explainability Mitigating Emerging Risks of Generative AI

As AI shifts from human-in-the-loop interfaces to autonomous multi-agent systems capable of real-time code execution and tool integration through protocols like the Model Context Protocol (MCP), traditional SAST, DAST, and legacy AI safety methods fail to detect modern agentic-AI threats. This paper introduces the LLM Scalability Risk Index (LSRI), a parametric framework and cybersecurity standard for stress-testing autonomous orchestration pipelines. LSRI measures the operational thresholds where load, compounding hallucinations, data poisoning, and adversarial prompt injections including jailbreaking and indirect prompt injection cause security boundaries to fail. Beyond RLHF and RLAIF, we present a Verifiable Root of Trust architecture using cryptographic attestation, semantic policy enforcement, and continuous runtime verification to secure the AI software supply chain. LSRI defends against malicious LoRA adapters, weight tampering, dependency typosquatting, and unsafe model artifacts from public registries such as Hugging Face and GitHub. By replacing post-hoc alignment with verifiable runtime controls, LSRI provides scalable API defense, safer agentic orchestration under heavy cloud workloads, stronger polymorphic malware detection, automated red-teaming, and improved system explainability. Aligned with NIST AI RMF, OWASP Top 10 for LLMs, and ISO 42001, LSRI establishes a deployable compliance baseline for securing generative AI ecosystems including ChatGPT, GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Copilot, LLaMA, Gemini, and Bedrock. LSRI also supports capital market risk analysis by reducing exposure across technology portfolios linked to indices such as NASDAQ-100, QQQ, and semiconductor-driven supply chains.

cs.CR

On the Convergence Rates of Learning-based Signature Generation Schemes to Contain Self-propagating Malware

In this paper, we investigate the importance of a defense system's learning rates to fight against the self-propagating class of malware such as worms and bots. To this end, we introduce a new propagation model based on the interactions between an adversary (and its agents) who wishes to construct a zombie army of a specific size, and a defender taking advantage of standard security tools and technologies such as honeypots (HPs) and intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDPSes) in the network environment. As time goes on, the defender can incrementally learn from the collected/observed attack samples (e.g., malware payloads), and therefore being able to generate attack signatures. The generated signatures then are used for filtering next attack traffic and thus containing the attacker's progress in its malware propagation mission. Using simulation and numerical analysis, we evaluate the efficacy of signature generation algorithms and in general any learning-based scheme in bringing an adversary's maneuvering in the environment to a halt as an adversarial containment strategy.

cs.CR

Toward a Theory of Cyber Attacks

We provide a general methodology for analyzing defender-attacker based "games" in which we model such games as Markov models and introduce a capacity region to analyze how defensive and adversarial strategies impact security. Such a framework allows us to analyze under what kind of conditions we can prove statements (about an attack objective $k$) of the form "if the attacker has a time budget $T_{bud}$, then the probability that the attacker can reach an attack objective $\geq k$ is at most $poly(T_{bud})negl(k)$". We are interested in such rigorous cryptographic security guarantees (that describe worst-case guarantees) as these shed light on the requirements of a defender's strategy for preventing more and more the progress of an attack, in terms of the "learning rate" of a defender's strategy. We explain the damage an attacker can achieve by a "containment parameter" describing the maximally reached attack objective within a specific time window.

cs.CR