Sayed Abdel-Gaber

Ensuring transparency and security in digital recruitment systems remains a critical challenge. This study proposes BC-XAIA, a unified framework that integrates blockchain, smart contracts, explainable artificial intelligence (XAI), and agile methodology to enable consistent, secure, and traceable recruitment decision-making. Smart contracts, implemented in Solidity and deployed using the Remix Ethereum IDE, automate key processes such as identity verification, data access control, and behavior monitoring, reducing reliance on centralized intermediaries. To support intelligent decision-making, multiple machine learning models, including Random Forest, Logistic Regression, and Support Vector Machine (SVM), were trained and evaluated on a recruitment dataset, with Random Forest achieving the highest performance, reaching an accuracy of 93%. To enhance transparency, SHAP and LIME were employed to provide both global and local interpretability of model predictions. Furthermore, agile methodology is embedded to drive continuous adaptation, iterative development, and stakeholder feedback throughout the recruitment lifecycle. Unlike existing recruitment systems that treat blockchain, AI, and explainability separately, BC-XAIA unifies these technologies within an agile and decentralized architecture. Overall, BC-XAIA establishes a secure, transparent, and explainable decentralized recruitment ecosystem that enhances trust, fairness, and intelligent decision-making in next-generation HR systems.

Phishing emails continue to pose a significant cybersecurity threat, particularly through the increasing use of malicious attachments to evade traditional text-based detection systems. Most existing approaches focus primarily on email content, creating a blind spot in attachment-aware phishing detection. This paper proposes a multi-modal phishing email classification model that integrates email header features, body text analysis, and attachment inspection within an ensemble learning framework. Independent machine learning classifiers are employed for each email component, and a majority voting mechanism is used to determine the final classification decision. The proposed model is evaluated using publicly available email and attachment datasets that are combined to simulate attachment-bearing phishing emails. Experimental results demonstrate strong detection performance across multiple evaluation metrics. Nevertheless, the study acknowledges the limitation of using synthetically paired email bodies and attachments, which may not fully capture real-world semantic relationships. The findings highlight the importance of incorporating attachment-aware analysis into phishing detection systems and provide a foundation for future research on semantic consistency modeling and transformer-based architectures.