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The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) networks plays a significant role in enhancing industrial automation systems by connecting industrial devices for real time data monitoring and predictive maintenance. However, this connectivity introduces new vulnerabilities which demand the development of advanced intrusion detection systems. The nuclear facilities are considered one of the closest examples of critical infrastructures that suffer from high vulnerability through the connectivity of IIoT networks. This paper develops a robust intrusion detection approach using machine and ensemble learning algorithms specifically determined for IIoT networks. This approach can achieve optimal performance with low time complexity suitable for real-time IIoT networks. For each algorithm, Grid Search is determined to fine-tune the hyperparameters for optimizing the performance while ensuring time computational efficiency. The proposed approach is investigated on recent IIoT intrusion detection datasets, WUSTL-IIOT-2021 and Edge-IIoT-2022 to cover a wider range of attacks with high precision and minimum false alarms. The study provides the effectiveness of ten machine and ensemble learning models on selected features of the datasets. Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique (SMOTE)-based multi-class balancing is used to manipulate dataset imbalances. The ensemble voting classifier is used to combine the best models with the best hyperparameters for raising their advantages to improve the performance with the least time complexity. The machine and ensemble learning algorithms are evaluated based on accuracy, precision, recall, F1 Score, and time complexity. This evaluation can discriminate the most suitable candidates for further optimization. The proposed approach is called the XCL approach that is based on Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), CatBoost (Categorical Boosting), and Light Gradient- Boosting Machine (LightGBM). It achieves high accuracy, lower false positive rate, and efficient time complexity. The results refer to the importance of ensemble strategies, algorithm selection, and hyperparameter optimization in enhancing the performance to detect the different intrusions across the IIoT datasets over the other models. The developed approach produced a higher accuracy of 99.99% on the WUSTL-IIOT-2021 dataset and 100% on the Edge-IIoTset dataset. Our experimental evaluations have been extended to the CIC-IDS-2017 dataset. These additional evaluations not only highlight the applicability of the XCL approach on a wide spectrum of intrusion detection scenarios but also confirm its scalability and effectiveness in real-world complex network environments.

The fast-paced environment of DevSecOps requires integrating security at every stage of software development to ensure secure, compliant applications. Traditional methods of security testing, often performed late in the development cycle, are insufficient to address the unique challenges of continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, particularly in complex, high-stakes sectors such as industrial automation. In this paper, we propose an approach that automates the analysis and testing of security requirements by embedding requirements verification into the CI/CD pipeline. Our method employs the ARQAN tool to map high-level security requirements to Security Technical Implementation Guides (STIGs) using semantic search, and RQCODE to formalize these requirements as code, providing testable and enforceable security guidelines.We implemented ARQAN and RQCODE within a CI/CD framework, integrating them with GitHub Actions for realtime security checks and automated compliance verification. Our approach supports established security standards like IEC 62443 and automates security assessment starting from the planning phase, enhancing the traceability and consistency of security practices throughout the pipeline. Evaluation of this approach in collaboration with an industrial automation company shows that it effectively covers critical security requirements, achieving automated compliance for 66.15% of STIG guidelines relevant to the Windows 10 platform. Feedback from industry practitioners further underscores its practicality, as 85% of security requirements mapped to concrete STIG recommendations, with 62% of these requirements having matching testable implementations in RQCODE. This evaluation highlights the approach’s potential to shift security validation earlier in the development process, contributing to a more resilient and secure DevSecOps lifecycle.

Data hiding in digital images is a promising direction of cybersecurity. Digital steganography methods provide imperceptible transmission of secret data over an open communication channel. The information embedding efficiency depends on the embedding imperceptibility, capacity, and robustness. These quality criteria are mutually inverse, and the improvement of one indicator usually leads to the deterioration of the others. A balance between them can be achieved using metaheuristic optimization. Metaheuristics are a class of optimization algorithms that find an optimal, or close to an optimal solution for a variety of problems, including those that are difficult to formalize, by simulating various natural processes, for example, the evolution of species or the behavior of animals. In this study, we propose an approach to data hiding in the hybrid spatial-frequency domain of digital images based on metaheuristic optimization. Changing a block of image pixels according to some change matrix is considered as an embedding operation. We select the change matrix adaptively for each block using metaheuristic optimization algorithms. In this study, we compare the performance of three metaheuristics such as genetic algorithm, particle swarm optimization, and differential evolution to find the best change matrix. Experimental results showed that the proposed approach provides high imperceptibility of embedding, high capacity, and error-free extraction of embedded information. At the same time, storage of change matrices for each block is not required for further data extraction. This improves user experience and reduces the chance of an attacker discovering the steganographic attachment. Metaheuristics provided an increase in imperceptibility indicator, estimated by the PSNR metric, and the capacity of the previous algorithm for embedding information into the coefficients of the discrete cosine transform using the QIM method [Evsutin, Melman, Meshcheryakov, 2021] by 26.02% and 30.18%, respectively, for the genetic algorithm, 26.01% and 19.39% for particle swarm optimization, 27.30% and 28.73% for differential evolution.