arXiv subjects

Saeid Jamshidi

Publications and source records attributed to Saeid Jamshidi.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Swarm-Driven Multi-Agent Reasoning for Smart City Security

Modern smart cities are interconnected cyber-physical ecosystems where heterogeneous devices exchange data and control commands. Coordinated attacks may appear as weak and distributed indicators, including low-rate scanning, abnormal credential use, protocol misuse, or delayed lateral movement, with each signal remaining below local alert thresholds. Therefore, smart-city security is not only an anomaly detection task but also a reasoning task under uncertainty, partial observability, and adversarial manipulation. This work presents TPSC-Sec, an LLM-based multi-agent approach for stable security reasoning in smart cities. TPSC-Sec decomposes analysis across specialized agents that inspect traffic behavior, protocol interactions, identity usage, and temporal attack progression. Their independent threat hypotheses are aggregated by the proposed Threat-Pheromone Swarm Consensus mechanism, which reinforces supported hypotheses, suppresses contradictions, and preserves temporal consistency, thereby driving competing interpretations toward a stable collective decision. We further introduce Adaptive Verified TPSC, which adds verification-aware calibration, context-sensitive weighting, and disagreement-adaptive control to reduce unsupported LLM outputs and reasoning inconsistency. Experiments over 500 runs show that TPSC-Sec achieves a high consensus acceptance rate of 0.97 plus or minus 0.02, hypothesis-support concentration above 0.99, a consensus margin of 2.08 plus or minus 0.21, low aggregate risk of 0.23 plus or minus 0.04, high inter-agent agreement of 0.82 plus or minus 0.06, and strong support-quality correlation of r equals 0.93. Adaptive agent selection reduces the number of active agents by 50 percent while improving system fitness by 11.6 percent. These results demonstrate robust, interpretable, and efficient security reasoning for adversary-resilient smart-city environments.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2026

Security Engineering of OpenClaw: Analyzing Attack Surface Expansion and Trust-Boundary Violations

Agentic large language model (LLM) systems can now execute actions, not only produce text. When model outputs trigger privileged operations such as shell commands, browser automation, or external tool calls, the security problem shifts from alignment alone to system configuration and structural design. We analyze OpenClaw, a self-hosted multi-agent system in which LLM outputs can execute commands and interact with tools and services. We measure compromise probability, boundary failures, privilege drift, and how these metrics change as attacker capability increases. With one agent, the compromise probability is 0.24. With seven agents, when the system executes an action, the compromise rises to 0.86 if any single agent proposes it. The models do not change; the increase comes from output aggregation. Prompt injection propagates instability across the system. Attack surface entropy increases from 0.42 to 0.71, indicating a broader distribution of exploit paths. The mean privilege drift increases from 0.03 to 0.21, indicating unintended authority gain. Positive escalation curvature of 0.08 indicates that privilege grows faster as attacker capability increases. Defensive controls, including policy gating and execution filtering, reduce compromise probability by 0.10, boundary failures by 0.10, and privilege drift by 0.02, all statistically significant at p < 0.0001. The system remains sensitive, but the mitigation impact is measurable. Injection mitigation success differs across models: 0.37 for GPT-5.2, 0.35 for Llama-4-Maverick, and 0.31 for DeepSeek-R1. When execution can be triggered by any single agent, the most vulnerable agent determines system exposure. Mitigations slightly reduce task utility from 0.93 to 0.89 and increase median latency from 420 ms to 468 ms.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2026

Game-Theoretic Multi-Agent Control for Robust Contextual Reasoning in LLMs

Large Language Models (LLMs) in multi-turn interactions maintain evolving context rather than generating isolated responses, making them vulnerable to prompt-injection and context-poisoning attacks in which locally plausible adversarial fragments gradually distort reasoning trajectories. Existing defenses mainly filter individual outputs and often ignore context evolution across turns, leaving long-horizon reasoning exposed. Although the Model Context Protocol (MCP) standardizes context exchange and tool invocation, it functions as a passive routing layer and does not enforce contextual stability. To address these limitations, we introduce the Game-Theoretic Secure Model Context Protocol (GT-MCP), a controller-driven multi-agent method that treats context management as a closed-loop dynamical process. GT-MCP coordinates three heterogeneous LLM agents and selects outputs through a trust function that jointly evaluates causal consistency against a validated context graph, semantic agreement among agents, and distributional drift over time. When instability is detected, a rollback-based self-healing mechanism restores the validated context and prevents unsupported fragments from propagating. Empirical evaluation over 500 interaction turns under an adaptive adversarial threat model shows that contextual drift remains bounded in 99.6% of turns, with recovery required in only 0.4%. Per-turn utility remains tightly concentrated, with median = -0.19, P05 = -0.72, and P95 = 0.30; severe degradation below -1 occurs in only 0.4% of cases, and no injection attempt succeeds at the controller level. Selected outputs maintain stable win rates above 98%, and computational overhead remains predictable, with latency per token = 1.63e-3 s.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2026

Semantic Multi-Agent Intrusion Detection for IoT:Zero-Day and Adversarial Threats with Risk-Aware Reasoning

The rapid proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices has enabled unprecedented automation and connectivity, but it has also substantially increased the attack surface, exposing networks to sophisticated cyber threats, including zero-day and adversarial intrusions. Traditional Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) struggle to generalize to unseen attacks, often require substantial computational resources, and lack interpretability, particularly in resource-constrained and heterogeneous IoT networks. Recent advances, including Deep Learning (DL), open-set detection, and Large Language Model (LLM)-based semantic reasoning, address some of these challenges but typically focus on zero-day and adversarial threats and rarely combine semantic reasoning with multi-agent systems. To overcome these limitations, we propose a semantic multi-agent ID that integrates four specialized agents (e.g., Scout, Mutator, Auditor, and Arbiter) that leverage semantic embeddings and multi-stage probabilistic decision fusion. The Scout induces structured hypotheses from semantic embeddings; the Mutator generates adversarially constrained variants; the Auditor evaluates consistency and filters unreliable outputs; and the Arbiter produces interpretable, risk-aware alerts. Extensive experiments across multiple real-world IoT datasets demonstrate that the proposed system achieves 95.9% overall detection accuracy, reduces false-positive rates to 6.8%, improves zero-day detection to 87.9%, and maintains computational efficiency suitable for edge deployment.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2026

Hallucination Cascade: Analyzing Error Propagation in Multi-Agent LLM Systems

Large Language Models (LLMs) generate fluent text but remain vulnerable to hallucinations, producing unsupported, inconsistent, and factually incorrect claims. Most prior work treats hallucination as a static property of isolated outputs. In multi-agent LLM systems, however, responses are exchanged across agents, revised through sequential stages, and reused as context for later reasoning. Hallucination, therefore, becomes a dynamic process shaped by interaction history, cascade depth, and model heterogeneity. This paper analyzes hallucination dynamics in multi-agent LLM cascades by tracking claim-level factual inconsistencies across sequential agent interactions. We conduct 500 cascade experiments across 10 knowledge domains using GPT-5.3, DeepSeek-V3, and LLaMA-3-70B-Instruct, yielding 1,250 evaluated responses. Results show that deeper cascades reduce the normalized hallucination score from 0.422 at the first agent to 0.272 at the final agent in 3-agent chains, with an amplification factor of 0.644, indicating net attenuation. This reduction is accompanied by a decline in factual accuracy from 0.789 to 0.769, revealing a trade-off between hallucination suppression and factual preservation. Transition-level analysis shows that each agent-to-agent refinement reduces hallucination by an average of 0.072, with small but consistent losses in factual consistency and response quality. Model-level results reveal reliability-efficiency trade-offs: LLaMA-3-70B-Instruct achieves the lowest hallucination score, whereas GPT-5.3 provides faster generation with a higher hallucination rate. Domain-level analysis shows that hallucination varies with topic complexity, with lower scores in well-grounded scientific domains and higher scores in more abstract domains.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2026

SGTO-MAS: Secure Gorilla Troops Optimization for Multi-Agent LLM Systems

Multi-agent large language model (LLM) systems offer strong capabilities for complex reasoning and decision-making, yet coordination across agents introduces error propagation, security risks, and inefficient use of resources. Existing methods often rely on heuristic, static strategies and lack a principled mechanism for balancing performance, security, and computational cost. This paper formulates multi-agent LLM coordination as a constrained optimization problem and proposes a security-aware method for adaptive agent selection. The method integrates trust modeling, risk-aware evaluation, and collective intelligence within a unified optimization objective. To solve the problem efficiently, we use a swarm-intelligence strategy inspired by Gorilla Troops Optimization (GTO), enabling adaptive coordination under varying threat conditions. Controlled experiments across 500 independent runs demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The system achieves a stable average performance score of 0.5281, with high consensus (0.8764), controlled risk (0.3000), and compact agent subsets averaging 4.04 selected agents. The optimization process converges efficiently, with an average runtime of 24.09 seconds per run and low score variability (standard deviation = 0.0173). Robustness analysis indicates graceful degradation under perturbations, with performance drops limited to 2.5% under agent removal and 5.3% under consensus disruption. These results show that effective multi-agent coordination can be achieved through structured optimization that jointly manages performance, security, and efficiency. The proposed method provides a practical security-aware solution for coordinating multi-agent LLM systems in complex adversarial settings.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2026

Collective Hallucination in Multi-Agent LLMs:Modeling and Defense

Hallucination is a critical reliability challenge in multi-agent Large Language Model (LLM) systems because unsupported claims can propagate through recursive interactions and produce collective false consensus. We model collective hallucination as a time-evolving network process over directed communication graphs and introduce HPR-Adaptive, a defense framework combining dynamic trust weighting, external claim verification, propagation-aware interaction regulation, and selective isolation of unreliable agents. We evaluate HPR-Adaptive on 1,317 TruthfulQA and TriviaQA queries using a heterogeneous six-agent system across five recursive reasoning rounds and multiple communication topologies. Compared with undefended multi-agent reasoning, HPR-Adaptive reduces hallucination rate from 0.118 to 0.072 (39.0%), while increasing factual accuracy from 0.812 to 0.867 and semantic consistency from 0.784 to 0.836. It also lowers the hallucination amplification factor from 1.34 to 1.08, increases propagation resistance from 0.882 to 0.928, and reduces the effective reproduction number from 1.08 to 0.81, shifting the system from self-sustaining propagation to controlled attenuation. Scale-free networks show the strongest cascading behavior without defense, with an amplification factor of 1.45 and reproduction number of 1.21; HPR-Adaptive reduces these to 1.12 and 0.92, respectively. These results show that propagation-aware control can substantially improve the factual reliability and stability of recursive multi-agent LLM systems.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2026

Self-Adaptive Multi-Agent LLM-Based Security Pattern Selection for IoT Systems

The adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) systems at the network edge of smart architectures is increasing rapidly, intensifying the need for security mechanisms that are both adaptive and resource-efficient. In such environments, runtime defence mechanisms are no longer limited to detection alone but become a resource-constrained task of selecting mitigation actions. Security controls must be carefully selected, combined, and executed under latency, energy, and computational constraints, while preventing unsafe interactions between controls. Existing approaches predominantly rely on static rule sets and learned policies, which provide limited guarantees of feasibility, conflict safety, and execution correctness in resource-constrained edge settings. To address this limitation, we introduce ASPO, a self-adaptive multi-agent security pattern selection that integrates Large Language Model (LLM)-based reasoning with deterministic enforcement within a MAPE-K control loop. ASPO explicitly separates stochastic decision generation from execution: LLM agents propose candidate mitigation portfolios, while a deterministic optimisation core enforces closed-world action integrity, conflict-free composition, and resource feasibility at every decision epoch. We deploy ASPO on a distributed edge-gateway testbed and evaluate it across two workloads, each comprising 500 and 1000 runtime security decisions, using replayed IoT attack traffic. In addition, the results demonstrate invariant safety properties, including 100% conflict-free activation, consistent resource feasibility across workloads, and stable pattern dominance with perfect rank preservation. Importantly, deeper decision exploration reduces extreme-case execution costs, compressing tail latency and energy overheads by 21.9% and 23.1%, respectively, without increasing mean energy consumption.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2026

Adversarial Moral Stress Testing of Large Language Models

Evaluating the ethical robustness of large language models (LLMs) deployed in software systems remains challenging, particularly under sustained adversarial user interaction. Existing safety benchmarks typically rely on single-round evaluations and aggregate metrics, such as toxicity scores and refusal rates, which offer limited visibility into behavioral instability that may arise during realistic multi-turn interactions. As a result, rare but high-impact ethical failures and progressive degradation effects may remain undetected prior to deployment. This paper introduces Adversarial Moral Stress Testing (AMST), a stress-based evaluation framework for assessing ethical robustness under adversarial multi-round interactions. AMST applies structured stress transformations to prompts and evaluates model behavior through distribution-aware robustness metrics that capture variance, tail risk, and temporal behavioral drift across interaction rounds. We evaluate AMST on several state-of-the-art LLMs, including LLaMA-3-8B, GPT-4o, and DeepSeek-v3, using a large set of adversarial scenarios generated under controlled stress conditions. The results demonstrate substantial differences in robustness profiles across models and expose degradation patterns that are not observable under conventional single-round evaluation protocols. In particular, robustness has been shown to depend on distributional stability and tail behavior rather than on average performance alone. Additionally, AMST provides a scalable and model-agnostic stress-testing methodology that enables robustness-aware evaluation and monitoring of LLM-enabled software systems operating in adversarial environments.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Multi-Agent LLM Governance for Safe Two-Timescale Reinforcement Learning in SDN-IoT Defense

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is increasingly adopted to secure Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks due to its centralized control and programmable forwarding. However, SDN-IoT defense is inherently a closed-loop control problem in which mitigation actions impact controller workload, queue dynamics, rule-installation delay, and future traffic observations. Aggressive mitigation may destabilize the control plane, degrade Quality of Service (QoS), and amplify systemic risk. Existing learning-based approaches prioritize detection accuracy while neglecting controller coupling and short-horizon Reinforcement Learning (RL) optimization without structured, auditable policy evolution. This paper introduces a self-reflective two-timescale SDN-IoT defense solution separating fast mitigation from slow policy governance. At the fast timescale, per-switch Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) agents perform controller-aware mitigation under safety constraints and action masking. At the slow timescale, a multi-agent Large Language Model (LLM) governance engine generates machine-parsable updates to the global policy constitution Pi, which encodes admissible actions, safety thresholds, and reward priorities. Updates (Delta Pi) are validated through stress testing and deployed only with non-regression and safety guarantees, ensuring an auditable evolution without retraining RL agents. Evaluation under heterogeneous IoT traffic and adversarial stress shows improvements of 9.1% Macro-F1 over PPO and 15.4% over static baselines. Worst-case degradation drops by 36.8%, controller backlog peaks by 42.7%, and RTT p95 inflation remains below 5.8% under high-intensity attacks. Policy evolution converges within five cycles, reducing catastrophic overload from 11.6% to 2.3%.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2026

Verifiable Manifest Signing and Transparency Enforcement for Secure MCP-Based LLM Pipelines

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in tool-driven environments such as healthcare analytics, financial systems, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and multi-agent workflows. Although the Model Context Protocol (MCP) standardizes how LLM applications expose and invoke external tools, its baseline model does not require tool-use manifests to be cryptographically authenticated, freshness-checked, policy-bound, or independently auditable before execution. As a result, MCP pipelines may remain vulnerable to manifest tampering, unauthorized tool invocation, replay of stale requests, and weak accountability. This paper presents a manifest-level enforcement layer for MCP-based LLM pipelines. It treats each MCP tool-use manifest as a first-class security object whose canonical form must be policy-validated, freshness-checked, digitally signed, verified before execution, and linked to tamper-evident audit evidence. The framework binds tool invocation to verifiable manifest integrity and fail-closed authorization, separates user-visible request parameters from execution metadata, rejects non-compliant or stale manifests before execution, and records accepted invocations in a Merkle-based transparency log. Evaluation across GPT-5.3, LLaMA-3.5, and DeepSeek-V3 using up to 50,000 manifest instances shows near-linear scalability (R^2 = 0.998), bounded verification latency (<= 9.4 ms on edge devices), and rejection of expired, malformed, replayed, and policy-violating manifests, with rejection rates above 98.7%. Experiments in healthcare, finance, RAG, and multi-agent settings show that manifest-level cryptographic enforcement enables low-overhead, traceable, and auditable execution control for heterogeneous LLM-tool pipelines.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2026

Securing Time Integrity in Energy IoT Against Clock Drift and Y2K38 Failures

Time integrity across distributed Internet of Things (IoT) devices is fundamental to reliable sensing, control, and security in energy cyber-physical systems. However, operational energy IoT systems remain vulnerable to clock-drift escalation, time-synchronization manipulation, and catastrophic timestamp discontinuities, e.g., the Year 2038 (Y2K38) Unix epoch overflow. These failures violate timestamp monotonicity, distort temporal ordering, and introduce structured inconsistencies in system observations. Conventional anomaly detection models, which typically assume reliable and uniformly ordered timestamps, are therefore ill-equipped to capture timing-layer failures. This paper introduces STGAT (Spatio-Temporal Graph Attention Network), a clock-dynamics-aware anomaly detection solution that jointly models temporal distortion and inter-device consistency in energy IoT systems. STGAT integrates drift-aware temporal embeddings and temporal self-attention to capture non-uniform and corrupted time evolution within individual device streams, while graph attention models the spatial propagation of timing inconsistencies across interconnected nodes. A Jacobian-regularized latent representation further promotes geometric separation between nominal clock evolution and anomalous temporal deformation caused by drift escalation, synchronization offsets, jitter accumulation, and epoch-overflow events. Experimental evaluation on energy IoT telemetry augmented with controlled timing-layer perturbations shows that STGAT achieves 95.7% accuracy, 94.0% precision, 92.0% recall, 93.0% F1-score, and 0.97 AUC under the primary test setting. STGAT also reduces detection delay to 2.3 time steps, corresponding to a 26% improvement over the closest baseline, while maintaining stable performance under overflow-induced discontinuities, stealthy drift escalation, and temporally induced physical inconsistencies.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Tri-LLM Cooperative Federated Zero-Shot Intrusion Detection with Semantic Disagreement and Trust-Aware Aggregation

Federated learning (FL) has become an effective paradigm for privacy-preserving, distributed Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) in cyber-physical and Internet of Things (IoT) networks, where centralized data aggregation is often infeasible due to privacy and bandwidth constraints. Despite its advantages, most existing FL-based IDS assume closed-set learning and lack mechanisms such as uncertainty estimation, semantic generalization, and explicit modeling of epistemic ambiguity in zero-day attack scenarios. Additionally, robustness to heterogeneous and unreliable clients remains a challenge in practical applications. This paper introduces a semantics-driven federated IDS framework that incorporates language-derived semantic supervision into federated optimization, enabling open-set and zero-shot intrusion detection for previously unseen attack behaviors. The approach constructs semantic attack prototypes using a Tri-LLM ensemble of GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3, and LLaMA-3-8B, aligning distributed telemetry features with high-level attack concepts. Inter-LLM semantic disagreement is modeled as epistemic uncertainty for zero-day risk estimation, while a trust-aware aggregation mechanism dynamically weights client updates based on reliability. Experimental results show stable semantic alignment across heterogeneous clients and consistent convergence. The framework achieves over 80% zero-shot detection accuracy on unseen attack patterns, improving zero-day discrimination by more than 10% compared to similarity-based baselines, while maintaining low aggregation instability in the presence of unreliable or compromised clients.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

Multi-LLM Energy Reasoning for Binary-Free Zero-Day IoT Detection

Securing Internet of Things (IoT) firmware remains difficult due to proprietary binaries, stripped symbols, heterogeneous architectures, and limited access to executable code. Existing analysis methods, such as static analysis, symbolic execution, and fuzzing, depend on binary visibility and functional emulation, making them unreliable when firmware is encrypted or inaccessible. To address this limitation, we propose a binary-free, architecture-agnostic solution that estimates the likelihood of conceptual zero-day vulnerabilities using only high-level descriptors. The approach integrates a tri-LLM reasoning architecture combining a LLaMA-based configuration interpreter, a DeepSeek-based structural abstraction analyzer, and a GPT-4o semantic fusion model. The solution also incorporates LLM computational signatures, including latency patterns, uncertainty markers, and reasoning depth indicators, as well as an energy-aware symbolic load model, to enhance interpretability and operational feasibility. In addition, we formally derive the mathematical foundations of the reasoning pipeline, establishing monotonicity, divergence, and energy-risk coupling properties that theoretically justify the model's behavior. Simulation-based evaluation reveals that high exposure conditions increase the predicted zero-day likelihood by 20 to 35 percent across models, with GPT-4o demonstrating the strongest cross-layer correlations and the highest sensitivity. Energy and divergence metrics significantly predict elevated risk (p < 0.01), reinforcing the effectiveness of the proposed reasoning framework.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

Semantic Attacks on Tool-Augmented LLMs: Securing the Model Context Protocol Against Descriptor-Level Manipulation

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to interact with external tools via tool descriptors, thereby extending their capabilities for task execution, autonomous decision-making, and multi-agent coordination. Existing MCP deployments treat tool descriptors as trusted metadata, despite their direct integration into the LLM reasoning context. This introduces a previously underexplored semantic attack surface. Current defenses primarily target prompt injection, neglecting descriptor-level manipulation that can bias tool selection and downstream reasoning. To address this gap, we formalize three descriptor-driven attack classes: Tool Poisoning, Shadowing, and Rug Pull. We propose a layered defense solution that integrates descriptor integrity verification, pre-context semantic vetting with an auxiliary LLM, and lightweight runtime guardrails, without requiring model retraining. We evaluate GPT-5.3, DeepSeek-V3, and LLaMA-3.5 across eight prompting strategies in controlled, adversarial MCP scenarios in which tool metadata is manipulated to simulate realistic attacks. Results demonstrate that descriptor manipulation can substantially alter tool-selection behavior, producing unsafe tool invocations in up to 36% of trials under baseline configurations. The proposed full-stack mitigation reduces unsafe invocations to 15% while increasing the block rate to 74%, demonstrating substantial improvement in resistance to descriptor-driven attacks. Cross-model analysis further reveals significant differences in robustness, latency, and sensitivity to descriptor-level manipulation across LLM architectures and prompting strategies. This study provides a controlled cross-model evaluation of descriptor-level threats and mitigation strategies in tool-calling LLM systems, establishing an empirical foundation for deploying secure and resilient tool-augmented LLMs.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

The Moral Consistency Pipeline: Continuous Ethical Evaluation for Large Language Models

The rapid advancement and adaptability of Large Language Models (LLMs) highlight the need for moral consistency, the capacity to maintain ethically coherent reasoning across varied contexts. Existing alignment frameworks, structured approaches designed to align model behavior with human ethical and social norms, often rely on static datasets and post-hoc evaluations, offering limited insight into how ethical reasoning may evolve across different contexts or temporal scales. This study presents the Moral Consistency Pipeline (MoCoP), a dataset-free, closed-loop framework for continuously evaluating and interpreting the moral stability of LLMs. MoCoP combines three supporting layers: (i) lexical integrity analysis, (ii) semantic risk estimation, and (iii) reasoning-based judgment modeling within a self-sustaining architecture that autonomously generates, evaluates, and refines ethical scenarios without external supervision. Our empirical results on GPT-4-Turbo and DeepSeek suggest that MoCoP effectively captures longitudinal ethical behavior, revealing a strong inverse relationship between ethical and toxicity dimensions (correlation rET = -0.81, p value less than 0.001) and a near-zero association with response latency (correlation rEL approximately equal to 0). These findings demonstrate that moral coherence and linguistic safety tend to emerge as stable and interpretable characteristics of model behavior rather than short-term fluctuations. Furthermore, by reframing ethical evaluation as a dynamic, model-agnostic form of moral introspection, MoCoP offers a reproducible foundation for scalable, continuous auditing and advances the study of computational morality in autonomous AI systems.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Think Fast: Real-Time IoT Intrusion Reasoning Using IDS and LLMs at the Edge Gateway

As the number of connected IoT devices continues to grow, securing these systems against cyber threats remains a major challenge, especially in environments with limited computational and energy resources. This paper presents an edge-centric Intrusion Detection System (IDS) framework that integrates lightweight machine learning (ML) based IDS models with pre-trained large language models (LLMs) to improve detection accuracy, semantic interpretability, and operational efficiency at the network edge. The system evaluates six ML-based IDS models: Decision Tree (DT), K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Random Forest (RF), Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), and a hybrid CNN-LSTM model on low-power edge gateways, achieving accuracy up to 98 percent under real-world cyberattacks. For anomaly detection, the system transmits a compact and secure telemetry snapshot (for example, CPU usage, memory usage, latency, and energy consumption) via low-bandwidth API calls to LLMs including GPT-4-turbo, DeepSeek V2, and LLaMA 3.5. These models use zero-shot, few-shot, and chain-of-thought reasoning to produce human-readable threat analyses and actionable mitigation recommendations. Evaluations across diverse attacks such as DoS, DDoS, brute force, and port scanning show that the system enhances interpretability while maintaining low latency (<1.5 s), minimal bandwidth usage (<1.2 kB per prompt), and energy efficiency (<75 J), demonstrating its practicality and scalability as an IDS solution for edge gateways.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

EcoDefender: Energy-Efficient Hybrid Anomaly Detection for IoT Edge Gateways

The rapid growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) has created large-scale, heterogeneous ecosystems that are increasingly vulnerable to sophisticated, distributed cyber threats. However, many existing anomaly detection systems prioritize detection accuracy while overlooking system-level constraints, such as latency, computational overhead, and energy consumption, thereby limiting their practicality for resource-constrained edge gateways. This paper presents EcoDefender, an edge-oriented hybrid anomaly detection framework that combines Autoencoder (AE)-based latent representation learning with Isolation Forest (IF) anomaly scoring for IoT traffic analysis. The proposed architecture introduces several enhancements over conventional AE-IF pipelines, including anomaly-aware latent manifold regularization, variance-weighted isolation splits in the latent space, and a learnable fusion mechanism that adaptively combines reconstruction error and isolation-based anomaly scores in the presence of potential distributional drift. By compressing high-dimensional traffic features into compact latent representations and performing anomaly scoring in this reduced space, EcoDefender enables lightweight and fully unsupervised anomaly detection suitable for edge deployment. An experimental evaluation of realistic IoT traffic and a distributed Raspberry Pi edge testbed demonstrates that EcoDefender achieves up to 94% detection accuracy while maintaining low computational overhead, with an average CPU usage of 22% and an end-to-end inference latency of 27 ms. Furthermore, energy-aware measurements obtained through device-level power monitoring show an average energy consumption of 0.45 J per inference (0.28 g CO2 emissions), representing a 30% reduction in energy consumption compared with AE-only baselines while sustaining inference throughput of up to 5,000 samples per second.

cs.CR↗