Virginia Tech National Security Institute team wins outstanding research award

Leveraging artificial intelligence to detect evolving cyber attacks recently earned international honors for a team of Virginia Tech National Security Institute (VTNSI) researchers. 

Their project, "Automated Cyber-Attack Detection and Mitigation under Non-Stationarity using Operating Envelopes," used transfer learning – a technique where a model trained on one task is repurposed for a related task – to teach a machine learning model how to detect unfamiliar cyber attacks. Their work won the Outstanding Research Award at the 11th annual Intelligent Systems Conference, in Amsterdam in August.

“When a new cyber attack is developed and implemented, it's not going to look exactly like anything that we've seen in the past and a model could fail to recognize it,” said Stephen Adams, assistant director of VTNSI’s Intelligent Systems Division. “So this work that we published looked at strategies for adapting AI models for when we think that there are new attacks in the environment and trying to do that as efficiently and quickly as possible.”

The project, which ran from 2021 to 2024, also gave three Virginia Tech students hands-on experience in research to prepare them to enter the workforce. 

“We tested the model on six different types of cyber attacks and it knew one type of attack going in,” said Jared Byers, who joined the project as a graduate student researcher in 2023 and graduated from Virginia Tech in 2023. “We were able to apply transfer learning to the other five scenarios to help the model detect them more quickly.”

Byers’ work on the project sparked his interest in cybersecurity related research and he is now a research associate in VTNSI’s Spectrum Dominance Division.

“Working on that project was the first time that I had been exposed to that kind of research so it showed me that this is what I want to do after graduating,” Byers said. “When I heard that VTNSI had an opportunity available, I knew I wanted to pursue it.”

Student research opportunities in national security, cyber security and related fields are offered through the Hume Center for National Security and Technology, which is housed within VTNSI and serves as the hub for national security-focused experiential learning and workforce development at Virginia Tech.