As quantum computing continues to advance, it poses unprecedented risks to traditional factor-based encryption methods, such as RSA, undermining the security of current cryptographic protocols. To address this pivotal security concern, this paper explores a quantum-safe solution that includes two cutting-edge Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) systems, two integrated encryptors, and various networking devices to establish a fortified framework for secure communication. We introduce a system environment setup encompassing the initial configuration, software updates, and management using CM7 software. Next, we delve into the essential configuration and integration steps for deploying a quantum-safe communication network. Moreover, we highlight the strategic implementation of automated script deployment processes, which are instrumental in configuring the QKD system and encryptors. Furthermore, we perform a performance evaluation of the quantum-safe network system, which provides valuable insights into the system’s resilience through experimental simulations of beam-splitting attacks. This study provides crucial insights into operational dynamics and showcases the effectiveness of securing communications against cyber threats, underlining the significant potential of quantum-safe solutions in fortifying network security.

The Internet of Vehicles (IoV), as one subset of the Internet of Things (IoT) in the smart transportation area, integrates vehicle networks with sensors and actuators. By connecting all sensors to the network, the IoV enables smart transportation (i.e., autonomous vehicles) and makes smart cities a reality. In smart transportation systems, roadside units (RSUs) capture all vehicle information and serve as gateways. However, smart transportation infrastructure has yet to mature in the current stage. RSUs are insufficient to support all vehicles. Meanwhile, the low computational capability of vehicles makes it challenging to recompute the driving route as the road environment changes. To address the problem of insufficient RSU coverage, one protocol called IEEE 802.11p enables vehicle-to-vehicle communication using relays. Nonetheless, data transfer among vehicles via relays is still time-consuming for a large-scale transportation network. To deal with the above issues, in this paper, we propose an IoV framework using digital twins (DTs) to digitize the IoV environment and assign nearby IoT gateways compatible with the RSU communication protocol. This framework lets DTs update the vehicle’s driving route based on real-time information. With a case study, we evaluate the efficacy of DT-assisted IoV based on communication latency and vehicle driving efficiency. Our evaluation results confirm that the proposed framework can efficiently enhance communication latency when the relay needs to pass through two or more vehicles and reduce travel time when vehicles receive updated route information at intersections.

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) envisions the tight coupling of numerous critical industrial manufacturing subsystems, such as control, networking, and computing through the ubiquitous Internet of Things technologies. Nonetheless, such interconnectivity poses significant challenges to the successful management and operation of massively distributed industrial manufacturing systems. Without carefully integrated system design, the nonoptimal management and operation of highly intertwined subsystems can lead to the loss of productivity and ultimately the value of factories and plants. To address this issue, in this article, we conduct the integrated design that is capable of simultaneously configuring both control and networking subsystems in IIoT with consideration for their inherent interdependencies. We first analyze the performance of the dynamic backoff exponential (BE) in IEEE 802.15.4 carrier-sense multiple access (CSMA) and show the performance improvement of dynamic BE. We then design a model-free reinforcement learning algorithm to configure the control and networking subsystems automatically via systematic trial and error, as it is impractical to build a model for a highly intertwined complex IIoT system. Considering the time-sensitive characteristics of IIoT systems, we design priority-aware policies based on importance among networking traffic (i.e., sensing traffic and actuation traffic) to improve the convergence speed. The experimental results demonstrate that our priority-aware reinforcement-learning-based integrated design can successfully reconfigure the complex and highly intertwined IIoT system at runtime with a minimal convergence time. Besides, our approach reduces convergence time by 37.5%, and energy consumption by 9.2%, compared to the standard reinforcement learning approach.

Solving quadratic congruences is a widely applied operation in cryptographic protocols to ensure the data secrecy in the Internet of Things (IoT). Yet it requires unaffordable computation resource for resource-constrained IoT devices when bulk of this type of operations need to be performed. How to efficiently and effectively solve quadratic congruences on IoT devices becomes a challenging issue. To address this problem, in this article, we propose two practical and secure outsourcing algorithms for solving quadratic congruences. Our proposed algorithms enable the IoT devices to outsource the heavy computation of solving quadratic congruences to a single cloud server, and therefore, achieve high efficiency for IoT devices. Meanwhile, we obscure the input and the output so that the outsourcing process does not leak the privacy of the computation, and the IoT devices in our algorithms can detect any misbehavior of the cloud server with a probability of 1. In addition, we take the Rabin encryption algorithm as an example to show how our proposed algorithms can be applied to IoT applications. The theoretical analysis and experimental results support the fact that our proposed algorithms are secure and efficient.

Deep learning, as an increasingly powerful and popular data analysis tool, has the potential to improve smart grid operation. One critical issue is that the accuracy of deep learning relies heavily on the integrity of the training dataset, and the data collection process is time-consuming and complex, resulting in that the applying deep learning may not satisfy the needs of time-sensitive applications. Moreover, in the smart grid, predictions must be timely, and cannot wait for the initial dataset to be completely collected by the sensors. Also, the traditional centralized data analytics structure requires the entire dataset to be uploaded to the cloud datacenter for analysis, which incurs significant network resource and increases network congestion. To address these problems, in this paper we consider the allocation of deep learning at the network edge and directly in the Internet of Things (IoT) devices and design an online learning approach to enable small data subset training and continuous model updating to ensure accuracy requirements in time-sensitive environments. In our online learning approach, we implement the Just Another Network model, an optimized Long-Short Term Memory neural network model, to reduce the computation overhead for the deep learning training process. We evaluate our approach using real-world smart grid dataset. Our experimental results show that our online learning approach significantly reduces the training time while satisfying the accuracy requirements.

Internet of Things (IoT) provides a generic infrastructure for different applications to integrate information communication techniques with physical components to achieve automatic data collection, transmission, exchange, and computation. The smart grid, as one of typical applications supported by IoT, denoted as a re-engineering and a modernization of the traditional power grid, aims to provide reliable, secure, and efficient energy transmission and distribution to consumers. How to effectively integrate distributed (renewable) energy resources and storage devices to satisfy the energy service requirements of users, while minimizing the power generation and transmission cost, remains a highly pressing challenge in the smart grid. To address this challenge and assess the effectiveness of integrating distributed energy resources and storage devices, in this paper we develop a theoretical framework to model and analyze three types of power grid systems: the power grid with only bulk energy generators, the power grid with distributed energy resources, and the power grid with both distributed energy resources and storage devices. Based on the metrics of the power cumulative cost and the service reliability to users, we formally model and analyze the impact of integrating distributed energy resources and storage devices in the power grid. We also use the concept of network calculus, which has been traditionally used for carrying out traffic engineering in computer networks, to derive the bounds of both power supply and user demand to achieve a high service reliability to users. Through an extensive performance evaluation, our data shows that integrating distributed energy resources conjointly with energy storage devices can reduce generation costs, smooth the curve of bulk power generation over time, reduce bulk power generation and power distribution losses, and provide a sustainable service reliability to users in the power grid.

In this paper, we investigate a novel real-time pricing scheme, which considers both renewable energy resources and traditional power resources and could effectively guide the participants to achieve individual welfare maximization in the system. To be specific, we develop a Lagrangian-based approach to transform the global optimization conducted by the power company into distributed optimization problems to obtain explicit energy consumption, supply, and price decisions for individual participants. Also, we show that these distributed problems derived from the global optimization by the power company are consistent with individual welfare maximization problems for end-users and traditional power plants. We also investigate and formalize the vulnerabilities of the real-time pricing scheme by considering two types of data integrity attacks: Ex-ante attacks and Ex-post attacks, which are launched by the adversary before or after the decision-making process. We systematically analyze the welfare impacts of these attacks on the real-time pricing scheme. Through a combination of theoretical analysis and performance evaluation, our data shows that the real-time pricing scheme could effectively guide the participants to achieve welfare maximization, while cyber-attacks could significantly disrupt the results of real-time pricing decisions, imposing welfare reduction on the participants.

In this paper, we investigate a novel real-time pricing scheme, which considers both renewable energy resources and traditional power resources, and can effectively guide the participants to achieve individual welfare maximization. Particularly, we develop a Lagrangian- based approach that transforms the global optimization conducted by the power company to distributed optimization problems. We show that these distributed problems are consistent with individual welfare maximization problems for end-users and traditional power plants. We also investigate vulnerabilities of the real-time pricing scheme by considering two types of data integrity attacks, i.e., injecting false data into demand-users and injecting false data into supply- users. Through a combination of theoretical analysis and performance evaluation, our data shows that the proposed real-time pricing scheme can effectively guide the participants to achieve welfare maximization. Our data also shows that data integrity attacks can effectively disrupt the results of real-time pricing decisions, posing welfare reduction on participants.