MAL-XSEL: Enhancing Industrial Web Malware Detection with an Explainable Stacking Ensemble Model

The escalating global incidence of malware presents critical cybersecurity threats to manufacturing, automation, and industrial process control systems. Given the fast-developing web applications and IoT devices in use by industry operations, securing a transparent and effective malware detection mechanism has become imperative to operational resilience and data integrity. Classical methods of malware detection are conventionally opaque “black boxes” with limited transparency, thus eroding trust and hindering deployment in security-sensitive contexts. In this respect, this research proposes MAL-XSEL—a malware detection framework using an explainable stacking ensemble learning approach for performing high-accuracy classification and interpretable decision-making. MAL-XSEL explicates the model predictions through Shapley additive explanations (SHAP) and local interpretable model-agnostic explanations (LIME), which enable security analysts to validate how the detection logic works and prioritize the features contributing to the most critical threats. Evaluated on two benchmark datasets, MAL-XSEL outperformed conventional machine learning models, achieving top accuracies of 99.62% (ClaMP dataset) and 99.16% (MalwareDataSet). Notably, it surpassed state-of-the-art algorithms such as LightGBM (99.52%), random forest (99.33%), and decision trees (98.89%) across both datasets while maintaining computational efficiency. A unique interaction of ensemble learning and XAI is employed for detection, not only with improved accuracy but also with interpretable insight into the behavior of malware, thereby allowing trust to be substantiated in an automated system. By closing the divide between performance and interpretability, MAL-XSEL enables cybersecurity practitioners to deploy transparent and auditable defenses against an ever-growing resource of threats. This work demonstrates how there can be no compromise on explainability in security-critical applications and, as such, establishes a roadmap for future research on industrial malware analysis tools.