Recent studies show that it is possible to detect technical dept automatically from source code comments intentionally created by developers, a phenomenon known as self-admitted technical debt. This study proposes a system by which a comment or commit is classified as one of five dept types, namely, requirement, design, defect, test, and documentation. In addition to the traditional term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF), several word embeddings methods produced by different pre-trained language models were used for feature extraction, such as Word2Vec, GolVe, bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT), and FastText. The generated features were used to train a set of classifiers including naive Bayes (NB), random forest (RF), support vector machines (SVM), and two configurations of convolutional neural network (CNN). Two datasets were used to train and test the proposed systems. Our collected dataset (A-dataset) includes a total of 1,513 comments and commits manually labeled. Additionally, a dataset, consisting of 4,071 labeled comments, used in previous studies (M-dataset) was also used in this study. The RF classifier achieved an accuracy of 0.822 with A-dataset and 0.820 with the M-dataset. CNN with A-dataset achieved an accuracy of 0.838 using BERT features. With M-dataset, the CNN achieves an accuracy of 0.809 and 0.812 with BERT and Word2Vec, respectively.
Despite outstanding results, machine learning-based Android malware detection models struggle with concept drift, where rapidly evolving malware characteristics degrade model effectiveness. This study examines the impact of concept drift on Android malware detection, evaluating two datasets and nine machine learning and deep learning algorithms, as well as Large Language Models (LLMs). Various feature types—static, dynamic, hybrid, textual, and image-based—were considered. The results showed that concept drift is widespread and significantly affects model performance. Factors influencing the drift include feature types, data environments, and detection methods. Balancing algorithms help with class imbalance but do not fully address drift, which primarily stems from the dynamic nature of malware. No strong link was found between the type of algorithm used and concept drift; the impact was relatively minor compared to other variables because hyperparameters were not fine-tuned, and the default algorithm configurations were used. The LLM evaluation is treated as an exploratory baseline because the original feature spaces were compressed using PCA to satisfy token-length constraints. Under this setting, LLMs showed promising few-shot performance but remained sensitive to temporal drift.
Despite outstanding results, machine learning-based Android malware detection models struggle with concept drift, where rapidly evolving malware characteristics degrade model effectiveness. This study examines the impact of concept drift on Android malware detection, evaluating two datasets and nine machine learning and deep learning algorithms, as well as Large Language Models (LLMs). Various feature types--static, dynamic, hybrid, semantic, and image-based--were considered. The results showed that concept drift is widespread and significantly affects model performance. Factors influencing the drift include feature types, data environments, and detection methods. Balancing algorithms helped with class imbalance but did not fully address concept drift, which primarily stems from the dynamic nature of the malware landscape. No strong link was found between the type of algorithm used and concept drift, the impact was relatively minor compared to other variables since hyperparameters were not fine-tuned, and the default algorithm configurations were used. While LLMs using few-shot learning demonstrated promising detection performance, they did not fully mitigate concept drift, highlighting the need for further investigation.
The adoption of cloud computing has brought significant advancements in the operational models of businesses. However, this shift also brings new security challenges by expanding the attack surface. The offered services in cloud computing have various service models. Each cloud service model has a defined responsibility divided based on the stack layers between the service user and their cloud provider. Regardless of its service model, each service is constructed from sub-components and services running on the underlying layers. In this paper, we aim to enable more transparency and visibility by designing an ontology that links the provider's services with the sub-components used to deliver the service. Such breakdown for each cloud service sub-components enables the end user to track the vulnerabilities on the service level or one of its sub-components. Such information can result in a better understanding and management of reported vulnerabilities on the sub-components level and their impact on the offered services by the cloud provider. Our ontology and source code are published as an open-source and accessible via GitHub: \href{https://github.com/mohkharma/cc-ontology}{mohkharma/cc-ontology}