arXiv subjects

Zahra Mousavi

Publications and source records attributed to Zahra Mousavi.

9 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Understanding the Impact of AI Code Assistants on Security API Usage: An Empirical Study

AI code assistants are transforming software development, but their implications for software security remain a major concern, particularly in the context of security APIs. These APIs are critical for safeguarding software systems, yet their complexity often leads to incorrect use and serious vulnerabilities. Developing an evidence-based understanding of how AI assistants influence developers' use of these APIs is therefore essential for informing effective mitigation strategies. While a few user studies have examined the broader impact of AI assistants on software vulnerabilities, the use of security APIs remains unexplored from a developer-centered perspective. This study addresses this gap by presenting the first empirical investigation into how AI code assistants affect professional developers' use of security APIs. We conducted a study with 44 developers who completed security API programming tasks with and without GitHub Copilot assistance. Our findings show that, while Copilot improves functional correctness and marginally reduces certain insecure patterns, it does not significantly improve secure API usage. We also found that developers rarely raised security concerns when engaging with Copilot, and many did not recognize that their final implementations remained insecure. Finally, we offer recommendations for enhancing security awareness among developers and propose future research directions to support safer AI-assisted software development.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

Machine-Learning-Enhanced Entanglement Detection Under Noisy Quantum Measurements

Quantum measurements are inherently noisy, hindering reliable entanglement detection and limiting the scalability of quantum technologies. While error mitigation and correction strategies exist, they often impose prohibitive resource overheads. Here, we introduce a machine-learning-based approach to achieve noise-resilient entanglement classification even with imperfect measurements. Using support vector machines (SVMs) trained on features extracted from Pauli measurements, we develop a robust optimal entanglement witness (ROEW) that remains effective under unknown measurement noise. By optimizing SVM parameters against worst-case errors, our protocol significantly outperforms conventional methods in classification accuracy. Numerical experiments demonstrate that ROEW achieves high-fidelity entanglement detection with minimal measurements, even when measurement errors exceed 10\%. This work bridges machine learning and quantum information science, offering a practical tool for noise-robust quantum characterization and advancing the feasibility of entanglement-based technologies in real-world settings.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

Scalable Entanglement Detection in Quantum Systems via Fisher Linear Discriminant Analysis

Quantum entanglement is the cornerstone of quantum technology and enables quantum devices to outperform classical systems in terms of performance. However, detecting entanglement in high-dimensional systems remains a significant challenge due to the exponential growth of the Hilbert space with the number of particles. In this work, we use machine learning to classify entangled states and separable states, focusing on the application of classical Fisher Linear Discriminant Analysis (FLDA). By adapting classical statistical learning techniques to quantum state discriminant analysis, we present the theoretical foundations, a practical implementation strategy, and the advantages of FLDA in this context. We systematically evaluate the performance of this method on different quantum states and demonstrate its effectiveness as a tool for efficient quantum state classification. Finally, we investigate multi-qubit quantum states with high accuracy and classify these states.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

Detecting Misuse of Security APIs: A Systematic Review

Security Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are crucial for ensuring software security. However, their misuse introduces vulnerabilities, potentially leading to severe data breaches and substantial financial loss. Complex API design, inadequate documentation, and insufficient security training often lead to unintentional misuse by developers. The software security community has devised and evaluated several approaches to detecting security API misuse to help developers and organizations. This study rigorously reviews the literature on detecting misuse of security APIs to gain a comprehensive understanding of this critical domain. Our goal is to identify and analyze security API misuses, the detection approaches developed, and the evaluation methodologies employed along with the open research avenues to advance the state-of-the-art in this area. Employing the systematic literature review (SLR) methodology, we analyzed 69 research papers. Our review has yielded (a) identification of 6 security API types; (b) classification of 30 distinct misuses; (c) categorization of detection techniques into heuristic-based and ML-based approaches; and (d) identification of 10 performance measures and 9 evaluation benchmarks. The review reveals a lack of coverage of detection approaches in several areas. We recommend that future efforts focus on aligning security API development with developers' needs and advancing standardized evaluation methods for detection technologies.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

Optimal entanglement witness of multipartite systems using support vector machine approach

An entanglement witness (EW) is a Hermitian operator that can distinguish an entangled state from all separable states. We drive and implement a numerical method based on machine learning to create a multipartite EW. Using support vector machine (SVM) algorithm, we construct EW's based on local orthogonal observables in the form of a hyperplane that separates the separable region from the entangled state for two, three and four qubits in Bell-diagonal mixed states, which can be generalized to multipartite mixed states as GHZ states in systems where all modes have equal size. One of the important features of this method is that, when the algorithm succeeds, the EWs are optimal and are completely tangent to the separable region. Also, we generate non-decomposable EWs that can detect positive partial transpose entangled states (PPTES).

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

An Investigation into Misuse of Java Security APIs by Large Language Models

The increasing trend of using Large Language Models (LLMs) for code generation raises the question of their capability to generate trustworthy code. While many researchers are exploring the utility of code generation for uncovering software vulnerabilities, one crucial but often overlooked aspect is the security Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). APIs play an integral role in upholding software security, yet effectively integrating security APIs presents substantial challenges. This leads to inadvertent misuse by developers, thereby exposing software to vulnerabilities. To overcome these challenges, developers may seek assistance from LLMs. In this paper, we systematically assess ChatGPT's trustworthiness in code generation for security API use cases in Java. To conduct a thorough evaluation, we compile an extensive collection of 48 programming tasks for 5 widely used security APIs. We employ both automated and manual approaches to effectively detect security API misuse in the code generated by ChatGPT for these tasks. Our findings are concerning: around 70% of the code instances across 30 attempts per task contain security API misuse, with 20 distinct misuse types identified. Moreover, for roughly half of the tasks, this rate reaches 100%, indicating that there is a long way to go before developers can rely on ChatGPT to securely implement security API code.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2022

NLP Methods in Host-based Intrusion Detection Systems: A Systematic Review and Future Directions

Host based Intrusion Detection System (HIDS) is an effective last line of defense for defending against cyber security attacks after perimeter defenses (e.g., Network based Intrusion Detection System and Firewall) have failed or been bypassed. HIDS is widely adopted in the industry as HIDS is ranked among the top two most used security tools by Security Operation Centers (SOC) of organizations. Although effective and efficient HIDS is highly desirable for industrial organizations, the evolution of increasingly complex attack patterns causes several challenges resulting in performance degradation of HIDS (e.g., high false alert rate creating alert fatigue for SOC staff). Since Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods are better suited for identifying complex attack patterns, an increasing number of HIDS are leveraging the advances in NLP that have shown effective and efficient performance in precisely detecting low footprint, zero day attacks and predicting the next steps of attackers. This active research trend of using NLP in HIDS demands a synthesized and comprehensive body of knowledge of NLP based HIDS. Thus, we conducted a systematic review of the literature on the end to end pipeline of the use of NLP in HIDS development. For the end to end NLP based HIDS development pipeline, we identify, taxonomically categorize and systematically compare the state of the art of NLP methods usage in HIDS, attacks detected by these NLP methods, datasets and evaluation metrics which are used to evaluate the NLP based HIDS. We highlight the relevant prevalent practices, considerations, advantages and limitations to support the HIDS developers. We also outline the future research directions for the NLP based HIDS development.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2022

Objective Prediction of Tomorrow's Affect Using Multi-Modal Physiological Data and Personal Chronicles: A Study of Monitoring College Student Well-being in 2020

Monitoring and understanding affective states are important aspects of healthy functioning and treatment of mood-based disorders. Recent advancements of ubiquitous wearable technologies have increased the reliability of such tools in detecting and accurately estimating mental states (e.g., mood, stress, etc.), offering comprehensive and continuous monitoring of individuals over time. Previous attempts to model an individual's mental state were limited to subjective approaches or the inclusion of only a few modalities (i.e., phone, watch). Thus, the goal of our study was to investigate the capacity to more accurately predict affect through a fully automatic and objective approach using multiple commercial devices. Longitudinal physiological data and daily assessments of emotions were collected from a sample of college students using smart wearables and phones for over a year. Results showed that our model was able to predict next-day affect with accuracy comparable to state of the art methods.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2017

Persian Wordnet Construction using Supervised Learning

This paper presents an automated supervised method for Persian wordnet construction. Using a Persian corpus and a bi-lingual dictionary, the initial links between Persian words and Princeton WordNet synsets have been generated. These links will be discriminated later as correct or incorrect by employing seven features in a trained classification system. The whole method is just a classification system, which has been trained on a train set containing FarsNet as a set of correct instances. State of the art results on the automatically derived Persian wordnet is achieved. The resulted wordnet with a precision of 91.18% includes more than 16,000 words and 22,000 synsets.

cs.CL↗