Adaptive cognitive firewall: A self-evolving security layer against evasive XSS payloads

Abstract

Web security has become a critical domain as modern applications increasingly rely on dynamic user-generated content, making them highly vulnerable to Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attacks. Traditional detection systems struggle to cope with evolving payload patterns, limited generalisation across institutions, and strict privacy restrictions that prevent sharing of sensitive request logs. To address these challenges, this work proposes a Zero-Knowledge Federated Sequence Learning (ZK-FSL) framework that enables collaborative XSS detection without exposing raw data or intermediate gradients. The model integrates attention-based deep sequence learning with zero-knowledge proof validation, ensuring both strong predictive capability and verifiable trust among participating clients. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that ZK-FSL achieves superior performance compared to centralised and federated baselines, reaching 96.3% accuracy , 96.7% precision , 95.9% recall , 96.3% F1-score , and an AUC of 0.98 . These results confirm that the proposed framework effectively enhances privacy-preserving threat detection while maintaining high robustness against diverse and sophisticated XSS attack patterns.