AVI-SHIELD: An Explainable TinyML Cross-Platform Threat Detection Framework for Aviation Mobile Security
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The integration of mobile devices into aviation powering electronic flight bags, maintenance logs, and flight planning tools has created a critical and expanding cyber-attack surface. Security for these systems must be not only effective but also transparent, resource-efficient, and certifiable to meet stringent aviation safety standards. This paper presents AVI-SHIELD, a novel framework for developing high-assurance, on-device threat detection. Our methodology, grounded in the MITRE ATT&CK® framework, models credible aviation-specific threats to generate the AviMal-TinyX dataset. We then design and optimize a set of compact, interpretable detection algorithms through quantization and pruning for deployment on resource-constrained hardware. Evaluation demonstrates that AVI-SHIELD achieves 97.2% detection accuracy on AviMal-TinyX while operating with strict resource efficiency (<1.5 MB model size, <35 ms inference time and <0.1 Joules per inference) on both Android and iOS. The framework provides crucial decision transparency through integrated, on-device analysis of detection results, adding a manageable overhead (~120 ms) only upon detection. Its successful deployment on both Android and iOS demonstrates that AVI-SHIELD can provide a uniform security posture across heterogeneous device fleets, a critical requirement for airline operations. This work provides a foundational approach for deploying certifiable, edge-based security that delivers the mandatory offline protection required for safety critical mobile aviation applications.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".