Papers for

cybersecurity tool developers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

OT system attack framework enables reproducible multi-source data collection

ISIA-AF: Orchestrating Reproducible Attacks and Multi-Source Data Collection for OT Systems

Abstract: Operational Technology (OT) environments require realistic, reproducible security datasets, yet existing approaches often lack automation, multi-source data capture, and sufficient documentation for reuse. This paper presents ISIA-AF, a modular attack framework for orchestrating reproducible attack execution and automated dataset generation on industrial systems. The framework coordinates distributed attack clients, records network traffic and operational data, ultimately leading to a multi-source dataset. We derive functional and non-functional requirements from prior work and stakeholder discussions, and realise the framework following a design science research approach. A case study on the ISIA testbed, comprising a real industrial system and a simulated process, demonstrates how the framework supports centralised control, low communication overhead, and flexible deployment across network segments. The result is a practical basis for generating extensible, multi-source OT security datasets for intrusion detection research.

Wed 16 SeptCryptography and Security
The gist
It is hard to create repeatable and well-documented data about cyberattacks on industrial control systems, which are important for research and defense. The authors developed ISIA-AF, a tool that automates attacking industrial setups while collecting data from several sources. This helps create consistent datasets needed to test and improve security methods. They tested the tool on a combined real and simulated industrial system to show it works efficiently and flexibly.
Open → 2609.18196v1

Personalization improves helpfulness of cybersecurity assistant answers

Evaluating the Impact of Personalization in Conversational Cybersecurity Assistants

Abstract: Users increasingly turn to Large Language Models to answer a variety of questions, including cybersecurity questions. We study how personalization strategies can help improve the effectiveness of answers to questions asked to an LLM-based cybersecurity assistant. Beyond accuracy, we focus on the understandability, actionability and, most importantly, motivating power of answers, given how often users fail to follow cybersecurity recommendations. Specifically, we investigate four personalization strategies, ranging from static user profiles to interaction-history-based personalization, using a corpus of 1,045 real-world cybersecurity questions and a 7-day deployment involving 57 participants and 1,066 user questions. Across both a large-scale automated LLM-based evaluation and human evaluation, conversation-based personalization is consistently favored in comparative ratings of perceived helpfulness and likelihood of following security advice. Importantly, the relative trends observed in the LLM-based evaluation align with those obtained from human evaluation, suggesting that LLM-based evaluation can provide a scalable mechanism for comparing personalization strategies before costly user studies. These results indicate that behavior-driven personalization is a promising direction for LLM-powered cybersecurity assistants and highlight the value of combining LLM-based and human evaluation when studying personalized language-model systems.

Tue 15 SeptCryptography and Security
The gist
People often ask computer programs for cybersecurity advice, but many don’t follow the recommendations. The authors studied different ways to personalize answers to make them easier to understand and more motivating. They found that tailoring answers based on ongoing conversations works best at helping users trust and act on the advice. Their tests showed that automated evaluations with large language models matched human opinions, making it easier to test improvements before real user studies. This suggests that using conversation history can make cybersecurity assistants more effective.
Open → 2609.17839v1