This work aims to leverage large language models (LLMs) and a featureless approach to effectively detect vulnerabilities in Internet of Things (IoT) network traffic. By directly learning from the Ripple20 dataset, a featureless LLM model, CyBERT, was designed that can efficiently distinguish between secure and vulnerable IoT devices without relying on handcrafted features. This LLM-based classifier could be instrumental in identifying IoT networks that pose potential threats to other connected devices by uncovering critical vulnerabilities. The experimental results demonstrate the exceptional capabilities of the featureless CyBERT model, which achieves high accuracy, precision, recall, and F1score in detecting zero-day vulnerabilities. Moreover, the model significantly outperforms traditional methods in terms of detection speed. These results have profound implications for the future of IoT security, paving the way for real-time threat and attack detection.

An enormous volume of data is generated in the Internet of Things (IoT), which needs to be anonymized before sharing with public or third parties to minimize reidentification risk and protect sensitive information. Data anonymization techniques can remove information capable of identifying individuals. However, inappropriate data anonymization can increase the risk of reidentification. This work focuses on potential attack risks of anonymized data by evaluating the potential attack risks. Specifically, we analyzed the attack risks over anonymized data with both randomization and generalization techniques. We also analyzed the risk of reidentification for five commonly used data anonymization techniques. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed solution can well evaluate the potential attack risks.

Abstract Conventional motion predictions have achieved promising performance. However, the length of the predicted motion sequences of most literatures are short, and the rhythm of the generated pose sequence has rarely been explored. To pursue high quality, rhythmic, and long-term pose sequence prediction, this paper explores a novel dancing with the sound task, which is appealing and challenging in computer vision field. To tackle this problem, a novel model is proposed, which takes the sound as an indicator input and outputs the dancing pose sequence. Specifically, our model is based on the variational autoencoder (VAE) framework, which encodes the continuity and rhythm of the sound information into the hidden space to generate a coherent, diverse, rhythmic and long-term pose video. Extensive experiments validated the effectiveness of audio cues in the generation of dancing pose sequences. Concurrently, a novel dataset of audiovisual multimodal sequence generation has been released to promote the development of this field.

Inherent vulnerabilities create new security risks and challenges that leave Internet of Things (IoT) systems open to cyber attacks. Featureless deep learning shows immense potential in vulnerability detection without relying on explicit feature engineering in the IoT. Featureless deep learning models provide a low-cost and low memory time-series analysis of network traffic. This paper proposes a featureless DL procedure in a 1D CNN model to carry out Ripple20 detection. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution, as it is beneficial for decreasing the time spent on feature engineering. Specifically, this proposed featureless model achieved 99% accuracy and an F1score of 99% in less time than traditional methods.

Blockchain-based Zero Trust Cybersecurity in the Internet of Things 1 INTRODUCTIONThe Internet of Things (IoT) connects a massive number of smart devices to the Internet, in which all data, applications, devices, and users require connectivity, security, and trust.Traditional security approaches assume that all participants within the network perimeter are trustworthy.However, in IoT environment data, applications, devices, and users are gradually moving outside the traditional trusted defence perimeter and have become a source of security risks.Unlike traditional security approaches, which are initially designed for the optimum protection and only act if a process is malicious, the zero-trust security framework upholds the "verify and never trust" principle.Zero trust-based approaches assume that everything within the system is untrustworthy and needs to be verified to prevent threats.Meanwhile, the blockchain technology shows promises on cyber security and several blockchain security mechanisms have been developed, including access management, user authentication, and transaction security.Due to its prowess in enhancing cyber security, blockchain can provide zero trust security framework with highly accessible and transparent security mechanisms via a visible blockchain, in which all transactions are visible to restricted operators.Zero-trust models can be secured further by a blockchain due to its sheer immutable nature and blockchain technology is expected to recognise them, authenticate their trust, and allow them access.Blockchain-enabled zero trust security can detect suspicious online transaction, isolate connection, and restrict access to the user.This special issue received in total 37 high-quality submissions.Per journal policy, it was ensured that handling editors did not have any potential conflict of interest with authors of submitted papers.All submitted papers were reviewed by at least three independent potential referees.The papers were evaluated for their rigor and quality, and also for their relevance to the theme of our special issue.After evaluating the overall scores, seven papers were selected by the guest editors and approved by the Editor-in-Chief for inclusion in this special issue.We will now briefly introduce the accepted papers. THE PAPERSThe paper entitled "Three-tier storage framework based on TBchain and IPFS for protecting IoT security and privacy" by authors Li et al. proposed to use a three-tier blockchain to split

The Internet of Things (IoT) is generating and processing a huge amount of data that are then used and shared to improve services and applications in various industries. The collected data are always including sensitive information (sensitive data, users/devices/applications behaviors, etc.), which can be exchanged over the IoT to third-party for storing, processing, and sharing with associated applications. It is important to protect data privacy from compromising using consistently privacy preserving techniques. In this work, we propose a privacy-preserving solution for both structured data and unstructured data by using data anonymization techniques, which are able to enhance privacy associated with IoT services, applications, and users/device behavior. This can allow IoT users/devices to access privacy-enhanced data protecting sensitive data against re-identification risks. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed solution can provide privacy-enhanced data for third-party services and applications over the IoT.

Abstract Cross-modal bird image–audio mutual generation has appealing potential benefits for bird classification. To achieve promising cross-modal bird visual–audio mutual generation, we propose an attention enhanced cross-modal cycle adversarial generation network. Specifically, the attention module endows our model with long-term intra-modality dependency and inter-modality dependency capabilities, which can provide more information during the generation process and further improve the generation performance. Moreover, because there was no dataset concerning bird visual–audio mutual generation, the authors established a novel bird cross-modal generation dataset, called Bird_Crossmodal_Generation (BCG). Based on BCG, our model obtains promising performance and achieves significant improvement under both inception score and Frechet inception distance criteria. The experimental results validate the feasibility of the proposed task and the superiority of our model. Additionally, this investigation provides a basis for more researchers to develop cross-modality methods for bird visual–audio generation.

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the main cause of dementia in the elderly. To date, it remains largely unknown whether and how dynamic characteristics of the functional networks differ from cognitively normal (CN) to AD. Here, we propose an AD dynamic network complexity intelligent detecting algorithm based on visibility graph. The focal regions that caused the dynamic abnormality of the connection mode were intelligently detected by creating a dynamic complexity network on the basis of the dynamic functional network. The results showed that the brain areas with different dynamic complexity gradually shifted from the frontal lobe to the temporal lobe and the occipital lobe. This was significantly related to the disorder of clinical patients from mood to memory and language. The increased dynamic complexity illustrates the compensatory effect of the brain area of AD lesions. In addition, the small-world topological properties of the dynamic complexity network have significant differences from CN to AD. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that such a concept is proposed. Our method of intelligently detecting the complexity of AD dynamic network provides new insights for understanding the internal dynamic mechanism of AD brain.

The emerging technologies, such assmart sensors, 5G/6G wireless communication, artificial intelligence, etc., have been maturing the future Internet of Things (IoT) by connecting the massive number of devices, which are expected to consistently collect and transmit real-time data to support business intelligence in an efficient and privacy-preserving way. The IoT can afford businesses predictive maintenance, improve field service, asset tracking, and further enhance customer satisfaction and facility management in industrial sectors. However, the privacy concern in IoT is a big challenge in IoT applications and services. This work proposed a lightweight privacy-preserving scheme based on homomorphic encryption in the context of the IoT, in which we investigated and analyzed the privacy issues between the data owners, untrustworthy third-party cloud servers, and the data users. Meanwhile, computationally efficient homomorphic algorithms are proposed to guarantee the privacy protection for the data users. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can effectively prevent privacy breaches in IoT.

Over the past few years, fog radio access networks (F-RANs) have become a promising paradigm to support the tremendously increasing demands of multimedia services, by pushing computation and storage functionalities toward the edge of networks, closer to users. In F-RANs, distributed edge caching among fog access points (F-APs) can effectively reduce network traffic and service latency as it places popular contents at local caches of F-APs rather than the remote cloud. Due to the limited caching resources of F-APs and spatiotemporally fluctuant content demands from users, many cooperative caching schemes were designed to decide which contents are popular and how to cache them. However, these approaches often collect and analyze the data from Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices at a central server to predict the content popularity for caching, which raises serious privacy issues. To tackle this challenge, we propose a federated learning-based cooperative hierarchical caching scheme (FLCH), which keeps data locally and employs IoT devices to train a shared learning model for content popularity prediction. FLCH exploits horizontal cooperation between neighbor F-APs and vertical cooperation between the baseband unit (BBU) pool and F-APs to cache contents with different degrees of popularity. Moreover, FLCH integrates a differential privacy mechanism to achieve a strict privacy guarantee. Experimental results demonstrate that FLCH outperforms five important baseline schemes in terms of the cache hit ratio, while preserving data privacy. Moreover, the results show the effectiveness of the proposed cooperative hierarchical caching mechanism for FLCH.

Rumors can spread very rapidly through online social networks (OSNs), leading to huge negative impact on human society. Hence, there is an urgent need to develop models that can minimize the spread of rumors. In this article, we propose a novel framework to improve the cost and efficiency of rumor propagation control. First, to reduce the impact of rumor controlling mechanism on users’ normal activities, we introduce a soft dynamic quarantine strategy into rumor propagation control and develop a new propagation model named susceptible-infected-removed-quarantined ignorants-quarantined spreaders (SIRQU) to model and block the rumor propagation in the network. Second, to further improve the control efficiency, we propose an influential node selection algorithm based on discrete particle swarm optimization with an evolutionary search strategy, and the controlling mechanism is only applied on the most influential nodes. Finally, we conduct a series of simulations and experiments on several public datasets and the dataset collected from Sina Weibo to validate the proposed method, and the results show that the proposed method outperfoms the related baseline algorithms.

The ever-increasing popularity of recommendation systems allows users to find appropriate services without excessive effort. However, due to the unstable and complex network environment, the historical behavior data of users are quite sparse in most cases. The inherent drawbacks render preference prediction infeasible for cold-start users and have become a crucial issue to be resolved in recommendation systems. To deal with the problems, we first present a Trust-based Collaborative Filtering (TbCF) algorithm to perform basic rating prediction in a manner consistent with the existing CF methods. Then, we propose the Hybrid Collaborative Filtering Recommendation approach with User-Item-Trust Records ($\text {UIT}_{\text {hybrid}}$), a novel approach that incorporates user trust into the existing CF-based methods in a harmonious way to supplement rating information.$\text {UIT}_{\text {hybrid}}$employs multiple perspectives to extract proper services and achieves a good tradeoff between the robustness, accuracy, and diversity of the recommendation. We conduct extensive real-world experiments on the Epinions data set to demonstrate the feasibility and efficiency of$\text {UIT}_{\text {hybrid}}$.

The descending of intelligence from the cloud to the heterogeneous and low-power edge in the Artificial Intelligence-of-Things prevents uploading user-sensitive information to the cloud. It brings an urgent demand for deploying training tasks collaboratively in industrial scenarios to manage data locally. This article proposes an edge-based collaborative training system for the smart factory which harnesses the intelligence of edge devices by balancing the computational and communicational resources and improving system dependability. Two typical scenarios of parts recognition and defect inspection are evaluated as a case study with our system. The feasibility and dependability of the presented system are verified with a platform composed of eight high-performance (Nvidia Jetson Nano) and eight low-performance edge devices (Raspberry Pi 4B). The efficiency under tradeoff between computational resource and network condition constraints in a cluster is tested to simulate real-case performance in smart factory scenarios. Our platform reaches the peak performance of 1167 images/s training efficiency on ResNet32 under a 125 MB/s bandwidth. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed design can collaboratively perform training tasks with optimized efficiency and provide dependable collaborations for system fault detection and cluster extension.

Anonymous exchange of data has a strong demand in many scenarios. With the development of IoT and wireless networks, plenty of smart devices are interconnected through wireless technologies such as 5G and Wi-Fi, making it possible to use them for information exchanging. The authors find a P2P network model for secure and anonymous communication, which is a typical Crowds system and the operating mechanism meets the characteristics of limited-resources of IoT devices. Based on this network model, the authors design a lightweight communication scheme for the remote-control system in this work, using two kinds ofVirtual-Spaces to achieve the purpose of identity announced and data exchanged. The authors implemented a prototype system of the scheme and tested it over theFreenet, proving that the scheme can effectively resist the impact of flow analysis on the anonymity of communication while ensuring communication data security. By analyzing the scheme’s performance, the author believes that the scheme is practical and is suitable for scenarios that are not time-sensitive but require high anonymity.

Abstract Customer preferences analysis and modelling using deep learning in edge computing environment are critical to enhance customer relationship management that focus on a dynamically changing market place. Existing forecasting methods work well with often seen and linear demand patterns but become less accurate with intermittent demands in the catering industry. In this paper, we introduce a throughput deep learning model for both short-term and long-term demands forecasting aimed at allowing catering businesses to be highly efficient and avoid wastage. Moreover, detailed data collected from a business online booking system in the past three years have been used to train and verify the proposed model. Meanwhile, we carefully analyzed the seasonal conditions as well as past local or national events (event analysis) that could have had critical impact on the sales. The results are compared with the best performing forecast methods Xgboost and autoregressive moving average model (ARMA), and they suggest that the proposed method significantly improves demand forecasting accuracy (up to 80%) for dishes demand along with reduction in associated costs and labor allocation.

Abstract Influencing factors analysis plays an important role in plant disease identification. This paper explores the key influencing factors and severity recognition of pear diseases using deep learning based on our established pear disease database (PDD2018), which contains 4944 pieces of diseased leaves. Using the deep learning neural networks, including VGG16, Inception V3, ResNet50 and ResNet101, we developed a “DL network + resolution” scheme that can be used in influencing factors analysis and diseases recognition at six different levels. The experimental results demonstrated that the resolution is directly proportional to disease recognition accuracy and training time and the recognition accuracies for pear diseases are up to 99.44%,98.43%, and 97.67% for Septoria piricola (SP), Alternaria alternate (AA), and Gymnosporangium haracannum (GYM), respectively. The results also shown that a forward suggestion on disease sample collection can significantly reduce the false recognition accuracy.

Internet of Things (IoT) applications have been used in a wide variety of domains ranging from smart home, healthcare, smart energy, and Industrial 4.0. While IoT brings a number of benefits including convenience and efficiency, it also introduces a number of emerging threats. The number of IoT devices that may be connected, along with the ad hoc nature of such systems, often exacerbates the situation. Security and privacy have emerged as significant challenges for managing IoT. Recent work has demonstrated that deep learning algorithms are very efficient for conducting security analysis of IoT systems and have many advantages compared with the other methods. This paper aims to provide a thorough survey related to deep learning applications in IoT for security and privacy concerns. Our primary focus is on deep learning enhanced IoT security. First, from the view of system architecture and the methodologies used, we investigate applications of deep learning in IoT security. Second, from the security perspective of IoT systems, we analyse the suitability of deep learning to improve security. Finally, we evaluate the performance of deep learning in IoT system security.

Smart cities require new access control models for Internet of Things (IoT) devices that preserve user privacy while guaranteeing scalability and efficiency. Researchers believe that anonymous access can protect the private information even if the private information is not stored in authorization organization. Many attribute-based access control (ABAC) models that support anonymous access expose the attributes of the subject to the authorization organization during the authorization process, which allows the authorization organization to obtain the attributes of the subject and infer the identity of the subject. The ABAC with anonymous access proposed in this paper called ABSAC strengthens the identity-less of ABAC by combining homomorphic attribute-based signatures (HABSs) which does not send the subject attributes to the authorization organization, reducing the risk of subject identity re-identification. It is a secure anonymous access framework. Tests show that the performance of ABSAC implementation is similar to ABAC’s performance.

With the ever-increasing maturity and popularization of the Internet of Things (IoT), tremendous business applications developed by distinct enterprises or organizations have been encapsulated into lightweight web services that can easily be accessed or invoked remotely. However, the big volume of candidate web services places a heavy burden on the users' service selection decision-making process. Under the circumstance, a variety of intelligent recommendation solutions have been developed to reduce the high decision-making cost. Traditional resolutions usually challenge in two aspects. First, the recommendation parameters, i.e., the quality of services (QoS), usually relies on user/service location heavily; therefore, low-quality recommended results may be returned to users if user/service location information is overlooked. Second, historical QoS data often contain partial sensitive information of users; therefore, it becomes a necessity to protect the sensitive QoS data while making accurate recommendation decisions. To tackle the above challenges, we introduce the concepts of user/service location information and locality-sensitive hashing (LSH) in the domain and propose a location-aware recommendation approach with privacy-preservation capability. A wide range of experiments is set up based on the popular WS-DREAM data set, whose results prove the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach.

Coordinating of energy networks to form a city-level multidimensional integrated energy system becomes a new trend in Energy Internet (EI). The collaborating in the information layer is a core issue to achieve smart integration. However, the heterogeneity of multiagent data, the volatility of components, and the real-time analysis requirement in EI bring significant challenges. To solve these problems, in this article we propose a stream processing framework based on linked data for information collaboration among multiple energy networks. The framework provides a universal data representation based on linked data and semantic relation discovery approach to model and semantically fuse heterogeneous data. Semantics-based information transmission contracts and channels are automatically generated to adapt to structural changes in EI. A multimodel-based dynamic adjusting stream processing is implemented using data semantics. A real-world case study is implemented to demonstrate the adaptability, feasibility, and flexibility of the proposed framework.

Digital image forensics is a key branch of digital forensics that based on forensic analysis of image authenticity and image content. The advances in new techniques, such as smart devices, Internet of Things (IoT), artificial images, and social networks, make forensic image analysis play an increasing role in a wide range of criminal case investigation. This work focuses on image source identification by analysing both the fingerprints of digital devices and images in IoT environment. A new convolutional neural network (CNN) method is proposed to identify the source devices that token an image in social IoT environment. The experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively identify the source devices with high accuracy.

Mobile Ad-hoc Cloud (MAC) is the constellation of nearby mobile devices to serve the heavy computational needs of the resource-constrained edge devices. One of the major challenges of MAC is to convince the mobile devices to offer their limited resources for the shared computational pool. Credit-based rewarding system is considered as an effective way of incentivizing the arbitrary mobile devices for joining the MAC network and to earn the credits through computational crowdsourcing. The next challenge is to get the reliable computation as incentives attract the malicious devices to submit fake computational results for claiming their reward and we have used the blockchain based reputation system for identifying the malicious participants of MAC. This paper presents a malicious node identification algorithm integrated within the Iroha based permissioned blockchain. Iroha is a project of hyperledger which is focused on mobile devices and thus light-weight in nature. It is used for keeping the track of rewarding and reputation system driven by the malicious node detection algorithm. Experiments are conducted for evaluating the implemented test-bed and results show the effectiveness of algorithm in identifying the malicious devices and conducting reliable data analysis through the blockchain based computational crowdsourcing in MAC.

Anomaly event detection has been extensively researched in computer vision in recent years. Most conventional anomaly event detection methods can only leverage the single-modal cues and not deal with the complementary information underlying other modalities in videos. To address this issue, in this work, we propose a novel two-stream convolutional networks model for anomaly detection in surveillance videos. Specifically, the proposed model consists of RGB and Flow two-stream networks, in which the final anomaly event detection score is the fusion of those of two networks. Furthermore, we consider two fusion situations, including the fusion of two streams with the same or different number of layers respectively. The design insight is to leverage the information underlying each stream and the complementary cues of RGB and Flow two-stream sufficiently. Two datasets (UCF-Crime and ShanghaiTech) are used to validate the effectiveness of proposed solution.

Human activity recognition (HAR) can be exploited to great benefits in many applications, including elder care, health care, rehabilitation, entertainment, and monitoring. Many existing techniques, such as deep learning, have been developed for specific activity recognition, but little for the recognition of the transitions between activities. This work proposes a deep learning based scheme that can recognize both specific activities and the transitions between two different activities of short duration and low frequency for health care applications. In this work, we first build a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) for extracting features from the data collected by sensors. Then, the long short-term memory (LTSM) network is used to capture long-term dependencies between two actions to further improve the HAR identification rate. By combing CNN and LSTM, a wearable sensor based model is proposed that can accurately recognize activities and their transitions. The experimental results show that the proposed approach can help improve the recognition rate up to 95.87% and the recognition rate for transitions higher than 80%, which are better than those of most existing similar models over the open HAPT dataset.

Anomaly detection is an important technique used to identify patterns of unusual network behavior and keep the network under control. Today, network attacks are increasing in terms of both their number and sophistication. To avoid causing significant traffic patterns and being detected by existing techniques, many new attacks tend to involve gradual adjustment of behaviors, which always generate incomplete sessions due to their running mechanisms. Accordingly, in this work, we employ the behavior symmetry degree to profile the anomalies and further identify unusual behaviors. We first proposed a symmetry degree to identify the incomplete sessions generated by unusual behaviors; we then employ a sketch to calculate the symmetry degree of internal hosts to improve the identification efficiency for online applications. To reduce the memory cost and probability of collision, we divide the IP addresses into four segments that can be used as keys of the hash functions in the sketch. Moreover, to further improve detection accuracy, a threshold selection method is proposed for dynamic traffic pattern analysis. The hash functions in the sketch are then designed using Chinese remainder theory, which can analytically trace the IP addresses associated with the anomalies. We tested the proposed techniques based on traffic data collected from the northwest center of CERNET (China Education and Research Network); the results show that the proposed methods can effectively detect anomalies in large-scale networks.

Benefiting from the massive available data provided by Internet of multimedia things (IoMT), enormous intelligent services requiring information of various types to make decisions are emerging. Generally, the IoMT devices are equipped with limited computing power, interfering with the process of computation-intensive services. Currently, to satisfy a wide range of service requirements, the novel computing paradigms, i.e., cloud computing and edge computing, can potentially be integrated for service accommodation. Nevertheless, the private information (i.e., location, service type, etc.) in the services is prone to spilling out during service offloading in the cloud-edge computing. To avoid privacy leakage while improving service utility, including the service response time and energy consumption for service executions, a Locality-sensitive-hash (LSH)-based offloading method, named LOM, is devised. Specifically, LSH is leveraged to encrypt the feature information for the services offloaded to the edge servers with the intention of privacy preservation. Eventually, comparative experiments are conducted to verify the effectiveness of LOM with respect to promoting service utility.

Internet of Things (IoT) are increasingly common in our society, and can be found in civilian settings as well as sensitive applications, such as battlefields and national security. Given the potential of these devices to be targeted by attackers, they are a valuable source in digital forensic investigations. In addition, incriminating evidence may be stored on an IoT device (e.g., Amazon Echo in a home environment and Fitbit worn by the victim or an accused person). In comparison to IoT security and privacy literature, IoT forensics is relatively under-studied. IoT forensics is also challenging in practice, particularly due to the complexity, diversity, and heterogeneity of IoT devices and ecosystems. In this paper, we present an IoT-based forensic model that supports the identification, acquisition, analysis, and presentation of potential artifacts of forensic interest from IoT devices and the underpinning infrastructure. Specifically, we use the popular Amazon Echo as a use case to demonstrate how our proposed model can be used to guide forensics analysis of IoT devices.

In the harsh environmental conditions of cyber-physical systems (CPSs), the consensus problem seems to be one of the central topics that affect the performance of consensus-based applications, such as events detection, estimation, tracking, blockchain, etc. In this paper, we investigate the events detection based on consensus problem of CPS by means of compressed sensing (CS) for applications such as attack detection, industrial process monitoring, automatic alert system, and prediction for potentially dangerous events in CPS. The edge devices in a CPS are able to calculate a log-likelihood ratio (LLR) from local observation for one or more events via a consensus approach to iteratively optimize the consensus LLRs for the whole CPS system. The information-exchange topologies are considered as a collection of jointly connected networks and an iterative distributed consensus algorithm is proposed to optimize the LLRs to form a global optimal decision. Each active device in the CPS first detects the local region and obtains a local LLR, which then exchanges with its active neighbors. Compressed data collection is enforced by a reliable cluster partitioning scheme, which conserves sensing energy and prolongs network lifetime. Then the LLR estimations are improved iteratively until a global optimum is reached. The proposed distributed consensus algorithm can converge fast and hence improve the reliability with lower transmission burden and computation costs in CPS. Simulation results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

We are pleased to announce the publication of the special issue focusing on intrusion detection and prevention in cloud, fog, and Internet of Things (IoT).Internet of Things (IoT), cloud, and fog computing paradigms are as a whole provision a powerful large-scale computing infrastructure for many data and computation intensive applications.Specifically, the IoT technologies and deployment can widely perceive our physical world at a fine granularity and generate sensing data for further insight extraction.The fog computing facilities can provide computing power near the IoT devices where data are generated, aiming to achieve fast data processing for time critical applications or save the amount of data transmitted into cloud for storage or further processing.The cloud computing platforms can offer big data storage and large-scale processing services for cheap long-term storage or data intensive analytics with more advanced data mining models.Hence, it can be seen that the IoT/fog/cloud computing infrastructures can support the whole lifecycle of large-scale applications where big data collection, transmission, storage, processing, and mining can be seamlessly integrated.However, these state-of-the-art computing infrastructures still suffer from severe security and privacy threats because of their built-in properties such as the ubiquitous-access and multitenancy features of

The decentralized nature of blockchain technologies can well match the needs of integrity and provenances of evidences collecting in digital forensics (DF) across jurisdictional borders. In this paper, a novel blockchain-based DF investigation framework in the Internet of Things (IoT) and social systems environment is proposed, which can provide proof of existence and privacy preservation for evidence items examination. To implement such features, we present a block-enabled forensics framework for IoT, namely, IoT forensic chain (IoTFC), which can offer forensic investigation with good authenticity, immutability, traceability, resilience, and distributed trust between evidential entitles as well as examiners. The IoTFC can deliver a guarantee of traceability and track provenance of evidence items. Details of evidence identification, preservation, analysis, and presentation will be recorded in chains of block. The IoTFC can increase trust of both evidence items and examiners by providing transparency of the audit train. The use case demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to connect a massive number of smart devices to the Internet. The existing centralized architecture for handling the huge volume of data created in the IoT is facing many research challenges, including security and privacy, trustworthiness, operational challenges, business models and the practical aspects, and legal and compliance issues. These challenges ask for new approaches to online identity, trustworthy transactions, and resilient networks.

The emerging blockchain technology shows promising potential to enhance industrial systems and the Internet of things (IoT) by providing applications with redundancy, immutable storage, and encryption. In the past few years, many more applications in industrial IoT (IIoT) have emerged and the blockchain technologies have attracted huge amounts of attention from both industrial and academic researchers. In this paper, we address the integration of blockchain and IIoT from the industrial prospective. A blockchain-enabled IIoT framework is introduced and involved fundamental techniques are presented. Moreover, the main applications and key challenges are addressed. A comprehensive analysis for the most recent research trends and open issues is provided associated with the blockchain-enabled IIoT.

Cyber-physical social system (CPSS) plays an important role in both the modern lifestyle and business models, which significantly changes the way we interact with the physical world. The increasing influence of cyber systems and social networks is also a high risk for security threats. The objective of this paper is to investigate associated risks in CPSS, and a hybrid Bayesian risk graph (HBRG) model is proposed to analyze the temporal attack activity patterns in dynamic cyberphysical social networks. In the proposed approach, a hidden Markov model is introduced to model the dynamic influence of activities, which then be mapped into a Bayesian risks graph (BRG) model that can evaluate the risk propagation in a layered risk architecture. Our numerical studies demonstrate that the framework can model and evaluate risks of user activity patterns that expose to CPSSs.

Social media networks are becoming increasingly popular because they can satisfy diverse needs of individuals (both personal and professional). Modern mobile devices are empowered with increased capabilities, taking advantage of the technological progress that makes them smarter than their predecessors. Thus, a smartphone user is not only the phone owner, but also an entity that may have different facets and roles in various social media networks. We believe that these roles can be aggregated in a single social ecosystem, which can be derived by the smartphone. In this paper, we present our concept of the social ecosystem in contemporary devices and we attempt to distinguish the different communities that occur from the integration of social networking in our lives. In addition, we propose techniques to highlight major actors within the ecosystem. Moreover, we demonstrate our suggested visualization scheme, which illustrates the linking of entities that live in separate communities using data taken from the smartphone. Finally, we extend our concept to include various parallel ecosystems during potentially large investigations and we link influential entities in a vertical fashion. We particularly examine cases where data aggregation is performed by specific applications, producing volumes of textual data that can be analyzed with text mining methods. Our analysis demonstrates the risks of the rising "bring your own device" trend in enterprise environments.

Mobile systems are facing a number of application vulnerabilities that can be combined together and utilized to penetrate systems with devastating impact. When assessing the overall security of a mobile system, it is important to assess the security risks posed by each mobile applications (apps), thus gaining a stronger understanding of any vulnerabilities present. This paper aims at developing a three-layer framework that assesses the potential risks which apps introduce within the Android mobile systems. A Bayesian risk graphical model is proposed to evaluate risk propagation in a layered risk architecture. By integrating static analysis, dynamic analysis, and behavior analysis in a hierarchical framework, the risks and their propagation through each layer are well modeled by the Bayesian risk graph, which can quantitatively analyze risks faced to both apps and mobile systems. The proposed hierarchical Bayesian risk graph model offers a novel way to investigate the security risks in mobile environment and enables users and administrators to evaluate the potential risks. This strategy allows to strengthen both app security as well as the security of the entire system.

The Internet of Things (IoT) contains a large number of different devices and heterogeneous networks, which make it difficult to satisfy different quality of service (QoS) requirements and achieve rapid services composition and deployment. In addition, some services in service-oriented IoT are required to be reconfigurable and composable for QoS-aware services. This paper proposed a three-layer QoS scheduling model for service-oriented IoT. At application layer, the QoS schedule scheme explores optimal QoS-aware services composition by using the knowledge of each component service. At network layer, the model aims at dealing with scheduling of heterogeneous networks environment; at sensing layer, it deals with the information acquisition and resource allocation scheduling for different services. The proposed QoS-aware scheduling for service-oriented IoT architecture is able to optimize the scheduling performance of IoT network and minimize the resource costs.

In a service-oriented Internet of things (IoT) deployment, it is difficult to make consensus decisions for services at different IoT edge nodes where available information might be insufficient or overloaded. Existing statistical methods attempt to resolve the inconsistency, which requires adequate information to make decisions. Distributed consensus decision making (CDM) methods can provide an efficient and reliable means of synthesizing information by using a wider range of information than existing statistical methods. In this paper, we first discuss service composition for the IoT by minimizing the multi-parameter dependent matching value. Subsequently, a cluster-based distributed algorithm is proposed, whereby consensuses are first calculated locally and subsequently combined in an iterative fashion to reach global consensus. The distributed consensus method improves the robustness and trustiness of the decision process.

Internet of Things (IoT) has provided a promising opportunity to build powerful industrial systems and applications by leveraging the growing ubiquity of radio-frequency identification (RFID), and wireless, mobile, and sensor devices. A wide range of industrial IoT applications have been developed and deployed in recent years. In an effort to understand the development of IoT in industries, this paper reviews the current research of IoT, key enabling technologies, major IoT applications in industries, and identifies research trends and challenges. A main contribution of this review paper is that it summarizes the current state-of-the-art IoT in industries systematically.

The emerging compressed sensing (CS) holds considerable promise for continuously acquiring biomedical signals in body sensor networks (BSNs), which enables nodes to employ a much lower sampling rate than Nyquist while still able to accurately reconstruct signals. CS-based BSNs are expected to significantly enhance the quality of healthcare and improve the ability of prevention, early diagnosis, and treatment of chronic diseases. However, existing BSNs are still unable to support long-term monitoring in healthcare, as well as providing an energy-efficient low communication burden and inexpensive scheme. Capitalizing on the sparsity of biomedical signals in transfer domains, this paper develops a continuous biomedical signal acquisition system, which explores a sparsification model to find the sparse representation of biomedical signals. The sparsified measurements of signals are wirelessly transmitted to a fusion center through BSNs. Meanwhile, a weighted group sparse reconstruction algorithm is proposed to accurately reconstruct the signals at the fusion center. Simulation results show that, on random sampling over BSN, the proposed group sparse algorithm shows good efficiency, strong stability, and robustness.

The emerging compressed sensing (CS) theory can significantly reduce the number of sampling points that directly corresponds to the volume of data collected, which means that part of the redundant data is never acquired. It makes it possible to create standalone and net-centric applications with fewer resources required in Internet of Things (IoT). CS-based signal and information acquisition/compression paradigm combines the nonlinear \nreconstruction algorithm and random sampling on a sparse \nbasis that provides a promising approach to compress signal and data in information systems. This paper investigates how CS can provide new insights into data sampling and acquisition in wireless sensor networks and IoT. First, we briefly introduce the CS theory with respect to the sampling and transmission coordination during the network lifetime through providing a compressed sampling process with low computation costs. Then, a CS-based framework is proposed for IoT, in which the end nodes measure, transmit, and store the sampled data in the framework. Then, an efficient cluster-sparse reconstruction algorithm is proposed for in-network compression aiming at more accurate data reconstruction and lower energy efficiency. Performance is evaluated with respect to network size using datasets acquired by a real-life deployment.

In this study, the authors have investigated a dynamic spectrum access method for cognitive radio (CR) networks by using polychromatic sets (PS) theory. First, a power control model is proposed in which the transmission power at a CR node can be calculated by considering both the primary radio (PR)-to-CR and PR-to-PR interference under a specific outage probability. In order to allocate the available spectrum among the CR nodes in a spectrum overlay scenario, the authors further propose a channel selection algorithm based on PS. This study also gives a framework of the PS-based method and concludes with future work describing the practical implementation of the proposed framework. Effectiveness of proposed method is demonstrated through an example application.

Adaptive signal identification has been an important issue in cognitive radio networks (CRNs). Most existing techniques require high-level signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for signal identification. This study presents an intelligent technique that focuses on a theoretical and experimental study of the signal identification by using manifold learning algorithm in CRNs. The authors pose the problem of signal identification in CRNs as signal classification by using manifold learning on high dimensions, and a novel manifold learning algorithm named as SIEMAP is proposed, which is able to identify signals in a low-dimensional space. Simulation results indicate that SIEMAP outperforms classical methods in low dimensions and is capable of identifying signal types from the received signals.

A quality of service (QoS) scheme for multimedia multicast communications in wireless mesh networks (WMNs) is proposed in this study. It uses a new bandwidth calculation scheme to provide rate-adaptive admission control. It relies on information it receives from the network and application layers to calculate the network bandwidth consumption and operates independently of the media access control (MAC) layer. Using the proposed QoS scheme, the network layer provides feedback on network congestion to the application layer. The multimedia multicast sender adapts the real-time data transmission rate based on the network congestion feedback it receives. In this study, the authors describe the detailed architecture of the proposed QoS scheme. Furthermore, the authors have implemented the QoS scheme in our previously developed uni-directional link aware multicast extension to AODV (UDL-MAODV) routing protocol. The authors present validation tests to ensure the correct functionality of the QoS algorithm using our SwanMesh WMN testbed. The authors have also performed simulation tests to evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme. The simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed QoS scheme.

Information is a very important resource in manufacturing systems. The vagueness or lack of information leads to uncertainty and information flow conflicts in designing complex engineering products. The formal realization of concurrent design process for manufacturing enterprise information systems is the sticking point of design process management. This paper proposes a novel method of modeling and analyzing for concurrent design process based on the unified modeling language (UML) and the polychromatic sets (PS) theory. Together with the feature-based part design and process planning, UML model of concurrent design process is established using the basic model primitives and constructs of UML activity diagram. According to the mapping principles, UML mode of feature-based part design and process planning is mapped formally into PS contour matrix model. Based on PS contour matrix, the model reduction, path search and time consumption of concurrent design process are analyzed quantitatively and the opportunities are discovered to improve concurrent design process.

As a method of system modeling, coloured Petri nets occupy an essential position in the fields of discrete events and dynamic systems. Traditional coloured Petri net is defined with multi-sets that made it difficult in the modeling formalization and difficult to understand in computing. In this paper, a new method to describe coloured Petri net with formalization mathematics is presented. In this research, multi-sets can be see as the product of two matrixes and CPN is a superposed net of series of Petri nets with the same base net. In order to describe CPN with mathematics method effectively, a new concept named as 'coloured token vector' is presented. As a case, routing protocols self-switch mechanism architecture for sensor networks is outlined, the mechanism modeled on the basis of CPN; this is the first such analysis of routing protocols self-switch mechanism in sensor networks, which is simple for use and effective modeling formalization.