Journal of Information Systems and Informatics
Vol 8 No 3 (2026): June

A Hybrid LSTM-GNN-Q-Learning Model for Zero-Day Attack Detection: Evaluation on CICIDS2017 with Simulated Zero-Day Setting

Musa L. Kazimoto (Tanzania Institute of Accountancy)
Juma S. Ally (Mbeya University of Science and Technology)
Stanley Leonard (Mbeya University of Science and Technology)



Article Info

Publish Date
27 Jun 2026

Abstract

Zero-day attacks exploit previously unseen vulnerabilities, making them difficult to identify using signature-based approaches. Their ability to bypass conventional detection mechanisms can result in significant financial losses, system compromise, and data breaches. To address this challenge, this study proposes a Hybrid Predictive Deep Learning (HPDL) model that integrates the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network for modelling temporal relationships, Graph Neural Networks (GNN) for structural relationship modelling, and Q-Learning for feature weighting and adaptive decision making. The model was evaluated on CICIDS2017 dataset under a simulated zero-day setting by holding out four attack types (Brute Force, SQL Injection, XSS, and Infiltration), totaling 2,179 zero-day samples deliberately excluded from training and validation and used only for final testing. Experimental results show that the proposed HPDL model achieved a zero-day attack detection accuracy of 99.63% and F1-score of 0.9970, outperforming LSTM-only and GNN-only baseline models, which achieved accuracies of 98.5% and 85.0%, respectively. These results indicate that integrating temporal, structural, and reinforcement learning paradigms provides an effective approach for zero-day attack detection.

Copyrights © 2026






Journal Info

Abbrev

isi

Publisher

Subject

Computer Science & IT

Description

Journal-ISI is a scientific article journal that is the result of ideas, great and original thoughts about the latest research and technological developments covering the fields of information systems, information technology, informatics engineering, and computer science, and industrial engineering ...