Cognitive Threat Intelligence and Explainable Federated Security Analytics for distributed Infrastructure Systems

Abstract: The increasing adoption of distributed infrastructure systems, cloud computing, Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, and edge-based architectures has significantly expanded the cybersecurity attack surface and introduced increasingly sophisticated cyber threats. Conventional centralized intrusion detection approaches often face challenges related to scalability, data privacy, communication overhead, and limited transparency in artificial intelligence-driven decision-making processes. To address these limitations, this study proposes a Cognitive Threat Intelligence and Explainable Federated Security Analytics framework for distributed infrastructure systems. The proposed framework integrates Federated Learning (FL), Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), and cognitive cybersecurity analytics to enable collaborative and privacy-preserving cyber threat detection across distributed network environments. Instead of transmitting sensitive raw network traffic data to centralized servers, local security models are independently trained at distributed nodes, where only encrypted model parameters and updates are shared through a federated aggregation mechanism. This decentralized learning architecture improves privacy protection while reducing communication dependency and centralized security risks. To enhance intelligent threat analysis, the framework incorporates machine learning and deep learning algorithms including Random Forest, XGBoost, Autoencoder