Guest Editors
Dr. Gogulakrishnan Thiyagarajan
Email: gothiyag@cisco.com
Affiliation: Software Engineering Technical Leader, Cisco Systems Inc. Austin, Texas
Homepage:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=eYu6ZJgAAAAJ&hl=en
https://medium.com/@gogs.ethics
Research Interests: cybersecurity, network security, cloud infrastructure, firewall automation, zero trust architecture, AI-driven security, agentic AI, explainable AI (XAI), intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDS/IPS), security automation and orchestration (SOAR), DevSecOps, policy-as-code, fedRAMP compliance, attribute-based access control (ABAC), identity and access management (IAM), secure software development, cloud-native security, threat intelligence, security analytics
Summary
The current cyber world is moving too quickly for traditional solutions to keep up with. Today's organizations operate in distributed or cloud-oriented and identity-centric models in which security solutions involve more than just rules and signatures. This involves context, attributes, intent, and intelligent automation.
Although AI use in security is escalating, current solutions are mostly reactive and are relatively simple to get around or defeat. Moreover, Zero-Trust Architecture is not yet in full operation because the absence of real-time context in security policies, identity infrastructure distributed across multiple locations, and lack of policy drift in Cloud and On-Prem infrastructure are not yet synchronized in Zero-Trust Architectures.
This special issue showcases the next significant step in cybersecurity research:
This type of security needs to be contextually aware, self-governed, identity-oriented, and AI-powered. Moreover, We would like to assemble researchers and practitioners contributing to enhanced cyber defense through the combination of:
· Agentic AI for autonomous security decision-making
· AI-driven policy automation and attribute-based access control (ABAC)
· Zero-Trust architecture powered by real-time context and identity signals
· Self-healing firewalls and dynamic threat-response pipelines
· Explainable and trustworthy AI models for security operations
· Machine learning for intrusion detection, anomaly detection, and threat prediction
· Cloud-native defense mechanisms in multi-cloud and containerized environments
· Secure AI development and mitigating AI-enabled cyberattacks
· Behavioral and knowledge-based security systems
· Privacy-preserving authentication and decentralized identity models
· Policy-as-Code, automated risk scoring, and autonomous SOC tooling
Why This Special Issue Is Unique
Current cybersecurity research often focuses on isolated components—ML models, threat detection, or identity management. However, very little work examines how these systems can work together through:
· agentic frameworks
· context synthesis
· real-time reasoning
· attribute-based enforcement
· autonomous orchestration
This issue will fill that gap by presenting holistic, integrated cybersecurity innovations that support autonomous defense, a capability urgently needed for both public and private sectors.
Topics of Interest
· Agentic AI and autonomous security systems
· AI reasoning frameworks for threat detection
· AI-driven dynamic attributes and policy automation
· Zero-Trust Architecture (ZTA) with identity- and context-aware enforcement
· Intrusion detection using ML, LSTM, transformers, or hybrid models
· Explainable AI (XAI) for security decisions
· Autonomous SOC workflows and AI-assisted triage
· Secure cloud infrastructure & multi-cloud defense strategies
· AI-powered firewall intelligence and adaptive rule creation
· Behavior-based malware and ransomware detection
· Zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP) for authentication
· Privacy-preserving machine learning
· Secure generative AI pipelines and prompt-injection defense
· Blockchain-based identity and decentralized access
· Cyber-physical system security with autonomous monitoring
· Attack simulation, red-team automation, and digital twins for cybersecurity
Keywords
agentic AI, zero-trust, autonomous SOC, context-aware, explainable AI, policy-as-code, privacy-preserving ML, self-healing
Login
Register
Submit a Paper
Propose a Special lssue