Modern communication networks, including 5G/6G, edge-cloud infrastructures, software-defined networking, network function virtualization, and the Internet of Things systems, are characterized by increasing scale, heterogeneity, and programmability, which significantly expand the attack surface and complexity of the cyber threat landscape. Traditional security mechanisms increasingly struggle to address evolving and sophisticated cyber threats.
AI and Deep Learning have enabled significant advances in automated threat detection, anomaly identification, and security analytics.
In this context, emerging Generative AI architectures offer new opportunities for network traffic analysis, intrusion and anomaly detection, threat prediction, and security decision support. Generative AI can also help address data-related challenges by synthesizing realistic network traffic, augmenting scarce attack samples, and simulating evolving threats.
At the same time, many AI-based security solutions operate as black-box models, limiting transparency, accountability, and trust. Security analysts need interpretable decisions to assess alerts, understand root causes, evaluate model reliability, and support effective incident response.
Generative and Explainable AI therefore provide complementary capabilities for modern network security. While Generative AI enables advanced data-driven security mechanisms and supports security data generation, Explainable AI provides transparency and interpretability of AI-driven decisions. Together, these paradigms can foster trustworthy, resilient, and adaptive security solutions for modern communication networks.


Special issue information:

This Special Issue (SI) aims to explore the methodological, technical, and practical dimensions of leveraging Generative and Explainable AI for network security in modern communication systems. By focusing on these cutting-edge themes, the SI seeks to provide a forum for researchers and practitioners to present innovative solutions, experimental evaluations, benchmark datasets, and real-world deployments that advance the state of the art. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

- Generative AI for network traffic modeling, synthesis, and cyber threat simulation;
- Generative AI-based network traffic analysis for intrusion, anomaly, and threat detection;
- Generative approaches for traffic-based attack detection and prediction;
- Generative AI for security log and flow data correlation in networked systems;
- Generative AI-driven automation for traffic-aware and resilient network security management;
- Privacy-preserving Generative AI for secure network traffic analysis;
- Robustness and resilience of traffic-based Generative AI security models under adversarial conditions;
- Explainable Generative AI for real-time network traffic monitoring and security decision support;
- XAI techniques for interpretable network traffic classification and security analytics;
- Explainable AI for traffic-level cyber resilience, fault diagnosis, and incident response;
- Evaluation metrics and benchmarking methodologies for explainability in network security;
- Explainability of foundation models and large language models for network security applications;
- Human-centered XAI and analyst-in-the-loop approaches for network security operations;
- XAI for understanding, auditing, and validating Generative AI models in network security;
- Generative AI for generating human-understandable explanations of network security events and alerts;
- Agentic AI for network threat detection, investigation, and autonomous network security operations.

Important Dates

Submission portal opens: September 21, 2026

Deadline for paper submission: February 28, 2027

Reviewed manuscripts due: July 31, 2027


Manuscript submission information:

The journal's submission platform (Editorial Manager®) will be available for receiving submissions to this Special Issue. Please refer to the Guide for Authors to prepare your manuscript, and select the article type of “VSI: GenXSec” when submitting your manuscript online. Both the Guide for Authors and the submission portal could be found on the Journal Homepage: Computer Networks | Journal | ScienceDirect.com by Elsevier.


Keywords:

Generative AI; Explainable AI (XAI); Agentic AI; Network Security; Intrusion Detection; Cybersecurity


Guest editors:

Anca Delia Jurcut

University College Dublin School of Computer Science, Ireland

anca.jurcut@ucd.ie


Alfredo Nascita

University of Naples Federico II, Italy

alfredo.nascita@unina.it


Francesco Cerasuolo

University of Naples Federico II, Italy

francesco.cerasuolo@unina.it


Jonatan Krolikowski

Huawei Technologies France SAS, France

jonatan.krolikowski@huawei.com