QR codes are widely used in applications such as information sharing, advertising, and digital payments. However, their growing adoption has made them attractive targets for malicious activities, including malware distribution and phishing attacks. Traditional detection approaches rely on URL analysis or image-based feature extraction, which may introduce significant computational overhead and limit real-time applicability, and their performance often depends on the quality of extracted features. Previous studies in malicious detection do not fully focus on QR code security when combining convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with recurrent neural networks (RNNs). This research proposes a deep learning model that integrates AlexNet for feature extraction, principal component analysis (PCA) for dimensionality reduction, and RNNs to detect malicious activity in QR code images. The proposed model achieves both efficiency and accuracy by transforming image data into a compact one-dimensional sequence. Experimental results, including five-fold cross-validation, demonstrate that the model using gated recurrent units (GRU) achieved an accuracy of 99.81% on the first dataset and 99.59% in the second dataset with a computation time of only 7.433 ms per sample. A real-time prototype was also developed to demonstrate deployment feasibility. These results highlight the potential of the proposed approach for practical, real-time QR code threat detection.

In modern automotive systems, introducing multiple connectivity protocols has transformed in-vehicle network communication, resulting in the widely recognized Controller Area Network (CAN) standard. Despite its ubiquitous use, the CAN protocol lacks critical security features, making vehicle communications vulnerable to message injection attacks. These assaults might confuse original electronic control units (ECUs) or cause system failures, emphasizing the need for strong cybersecurity solutions in automobile networks. This study addresses this need by developing a quick and efficient abnormal traffic detection system to protect vehicular communications from cyber attacks. The proposed system utilizes four machine learning techniques: Adaboost Trees (ABT), Coarse Decision Trees (CDT), Naive Bayes Classifier (NBC), and Support Vector Machine (SVM). These models were carefully assessed on the Car-Hacking-2018 dataset, which simulates real-time vehicular communication scenarios. Specifically, the system considers five balanced classes, including one normal traffic class and four classes for message injection attacks over the in-vehicle controller area network: fuzzy attack, DoS attack, RPM attack (spoofing), and gear attack (spoofing). Our best performance outcomes belong to the ABT model, which notched 99.8% classification accuracy and 6.67 µs of classification overhead. Such results have outweighed existing in-vehicle intrusion detection systems employing the same/similar dataset.