Technological evolution in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) domain has fostered smart grid systems’ operation, performance, connectivity, and delivery with higher efficiency. However, it has also exposed the platform to a broader surface for attackers. Current information technology (IT)-centric solutions for detecting, preventing, and mitigating attacks have limitations, especially in comprehensively monitoring industrial control operational technology (OT) and communication systems. The rise of sophisticated cyberattacks, such as targeted ransomware, demand more robust security measures, leading to the emergence of zero trust (ZT) deployment as a response to these threats. This article proposes a new framework for implementing ZT comprising both IT and OT in smart grid infrastructures, with multiple security mechanisms and robust system coverage. We present an EigenGame algorithm for integrating diverse data sources into a rich-context format and an enhanced approach to quantum reinforcement learning for reliable malicious behavior detection in IIoT-enabled smart grids. The framework was evaluated using five sets of data from the X-IIoTID dataset, demonstrating its good performance in verifying any behavior inside the system and identifying any malicious behavior related ransomware attacks.

This paper addresses the challenge of fault analysis in the Vehicular Energy Network (VEN) caused by small fault samples due to transient faults and complex disturbances. The proposed generation and diagnosis networks (GDNs) are developed without necessitating prior knowledge or manual intervention. The approach starts with an encoding and diagnosis network that converts multi-dimensional signals into images through supervised learning. A sample enhancement network, improved with module transfer and a relaxation objective function, is then proposed to increase the reliability of convergence and diversity of features for small fault samples. Additionally, a joint iterative training strategy between these two networks improves diagnostic accuracy and generalization through feature feedback. Performance validation on a semi-physical simulation platform demonstrates that the proposed GDNs achieve a 20% improvement in diagnostic accuracy with small datasets (200 samples) and maintain superior performance as sample volume grows. Thus, the proposed approach offers a potent solution for fault diagnosis in VENs with scarce samples, enhancing the analysis of complex systems. Note to Practitioners—This paper delves into fault diagnosis in the vehicular energy network (VEN) using small samples, employing a data-driven and deep learning model. The proposed method is versatile, suitable for analyzing complex systems with multiple and heterogeneous signals. An end-to-end model, named generation and diagnosis networks (GDNs), is introduced for generating small samples and conducting fault diagnosis without requiring prior knowledge or manual input. This method encodes multiple signals into signal images, which are then processed by a specially designed sample enhancement model, improved through the relaxation objective function and module transfer method. The enhanced samples are utilized for accurate analysis within the encoding and diagnosis networks’ diagnostic unit. The paper also provides a comparison of diagnosis results for reference. This approach enables researchers and engineers to efficiently augment and analyze small samples in practical applications, offering a practical framework for junior and inexperienced analysts. Preliminary experiments conducted using the RT-Lab semi-physical simulation platform suggest the method’s feasibility and effectiveness. Future research will explore the optimization of the model’s topology and parameters for lightweight design.

In the era of zero trust security models and next-generation networks (NGN), the primary challenge is that network nodes may be untrusted, even if they have been verified, necessitating continuous validation and scrutiny. Effective intrusion detection systems (IDS) are crucial for continuously monitoring network traffic and identifying potential threats. However, traditional IDS approaches often struggle to keep pace with evolving threats, requiring extensive supervised training on labeled datasets. This limitation leads to high false positive rates, low detection accuracy, and a failure to provide real-time detection, thereby undermining the security of NGNs. This paper proposed the first self-supervised learning-based IDS, designed on temporal contrastive graph neural network (GNN), namely$\mathsf{TCG}\text{-}\mathsf{IDS}$. It innovatively integrates three contrastive learning strategies: temporal contrasting to capture temporal dependencies, asymmetric contrasting to account for the diverse interactions within network data, and masked contrasting to enhance the learning of node representations by masking parts of the data during training. Performance evaluation was conducted on two publicly available network traffic datasets, NF-CSE-CIC-IDS2018-V2 and NF-UNSW-NB15-V2.$\mathsf{TCG}\text{-}\mathsf{IDS}$achieved a balanced accuracy of 99.48% and 91.48% on two datasets respectively, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art graph learning models. In multi-class detection,$\mathsf{TCG}\text{-}\mathsf{IDS}$attained a mean false positive rate of 4.15% and 3.34% on the two datasets respectively. Besides, it exhibits high efficiency with its running time of 0.37s and 0.51s on the two datasets to predict per batch of 100 samples. Results highlight the effectiveness and efficiency of$\mathsf{TCG}\text{-}\mathsf{IDS}$in accurately detecting various types of network intrusions. This work significantly advances the field of network intrusion detection via self-supervised temporal graph learning, offering a promising solution for future network security systems.

Range queries allow data users to outsource their data to a Cloud Server (CS) that responds to data users who submit a request with range conditions. However, security concerns hinder the wide-scale adoption. Existing works neglect item availability, fail to protect secure verification or sacrifice search accuracy for efficiency. In this paper, we propose Secure, Available, Verifiable, and Efficient (SAVE) range query processing, which has three distinctive features. (1) Secure availability checking against a malicious CS: we design a keyed index-based secure verification mechanism to check the availability of matched nodes, including validity and freshness. (2) Secure result verification: we design a targeted verification mechanism for result correctness and completeness while not compromising security. (3) Improved efficiency and accuracy: we design a lay-ered encoding method to improve search efficiency and accuracy. We formally stated and proved the security of SAVE in the random oracle model. We conducted extensive experiments over the Yelp and FourSquare dataset to validate the efficiency, e.g., a query over 10 thousand data items only needs 19.4 ms to get queried results and 3.5 ms for local verification.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has recently received a lot of attention from the information and communication technology community. It has turned out to be a crucial development for harnessing the incredible power of wireless media in the real world. The nature of IoT-Fog networks requires the use of defense techniques who are light and mobile-aware. The edge resources in such a distributed environment are open to various safety hazards. DDoS UDP flooding attacks are the most frequent threats to edge resources in IoT-Fog networks. It is crucial for sabotaging fog gateways and can overcome traditional data filtering techniques. This paper introduces M-RL, a lightweight intrusion detection system with mobility awareness that can detect DDoS UDP flooding attacks while taking into account adversarial IoT devices that engage in IP spoofing. To this end, this paper analyzes the malicious behaviors that result in anonymity against Rate Limiting and Received Signal Strength (RSS)-based approaches, combines their advantages, and addresses their vulnerabilities. We test our method in different contexts to achieve that goal, and we find that it may decrease the accuracy of the RL, RSS, and RSS-RL methods to 70%, 48.9%, and 64.3%, respectively. The outcomes demonstrate the proposed approach's resistance to software-based source address forgery, impersonation, and signal modification. It offers more than 99% accuracy and supports node mobility. In this case, the best possible accuracy of the previous methods is 77%.

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is a collection of interconnected smart sensors and actuators with industrial software tools and applications. IIoT aims to enhance manufacturing and industrial processes by capturing and analyzing real-time industrial data. However, the heterogeneous and homogeneous nature of IIoT networks makes them vulnerable to several security threats. As data is transmitted over an insecure communication medium, intruders may intercept communication among different entities and perform malicious activities. Consequently, ensuring the security and privacy of data transmitted in IIoT networks is essential. Motivated by the aforementioned challenges, this article presents a deep-learning-integrated blockchain framework for securing IIoT networks. Specifically, first, we design a private blockchain-based secure communication among the IIoT entities using session-based mutual authentication and key agreement mechanism. In this approach, the Proof-of-Authority (PoA) consensus mechanism is used for verification of the transactions and block creation based on the voting of miners over the cloud server. Second, we design a novel deep-learning-based intrusion detection system that combines contractive sparse autoencoder (CSAE), attention-based bidirectional long short-term memory (ABiLSTM) networks, and softmax classifier for cyberattack detection. The practical implementation of blockchain and deep-learning techniques proves the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

Extreme events (such as earthquakes, hurricanes, etc.) pose a dual challenge to the reliability and serviceability of Internet of Things (IoT) systems. With regard to this challenge, by publishing some tasks and then encouraging the public to assist in real-time data collection through their mobile terminals (namely, the mobile crowdsourcing-assisted IoT systems), is expected to play an important role in secondary disaster prevention and personnel rescue in extreme events. However, it has weaknesses in terms of security, flexibility, and efficiency. As an elegant solution, identity-based broadcast proxy re-encryption (PR-IBBE) enables flexible access authorization sharing and efficient broadcast distribution of encrypted tasks via the cloud. However, their security relies on fully trusted or semi-trusted cloud assumptions, which are hard to be implemented in real-world scenarios. And the cloud is more vulnerable in an emergency event since there is a lack of effective management. Motivated by that, we propose the verifiable PR-IBBE (VPR-IBBE) scheme, which realizes a cross-domain identity-based broadcast task file secure authorization access, and empowers the verifiability and reputability of re-encrypted ciphertext under the untrusted cloud setting. This mechanism ensures that the relevance between the re-encrypted ciphertext and the original ciphertext can be publically verified, so the cloud can defend itself if there is a malicious accusation of forging the re-encrypted ciphertext. Through rigorous formal security proofs, we demonstrate that VPR-IBBE attains the indistinguishability of ciphertext against selective identity chosen ciphertext attack (IND-sID-CPA), and is also resistant to the collusion attack between the untrusted cloud and the cooperative performer. Theoretical comparison and experimental results demonstrate the practicability of our VPR-IBBE scheme, as well as the superiority over representative related works.

Nowadays, there is global consensus on the threats to forests and their crucial role in mitigating global warming and its impact on Earth’s biodiversity. Both private and public entities, alongside governments, have engaged the most advanced technologies to safeguard and monitor forests against encroachment. This article examines the application of various drone technologies in the surveillance of forest areas. The system described herein employs drones to continuously survey forests, recording any changes, particularly in instances of encroachment or fire. The data captured are transmitted to a control unit for subsequent analysis. To circumvent the risk of task failure due to technical challenges, monitoring tasks within a predefined flight duration are allocated to the available drones. Given the critical nature of timing in the success of these tasks, this study addresses the forest monitoring challenge by seeking to minimize the maximum time required to complete all monitoring tasks. This challenge was addressed through the development of a suite of enhanced algorithms aimed at optimizing task efficiency. The primary goal of the proposed methodology is to afford the monitoring system additional time, thereby enabling the handling of an increased volume of tasks and providing support to firefighting teams in responding to forest fires. The system’s adaptability to new, unforeseen forest fire scenarios through the generation of novel solutions is also discussed. Extensive testing involving 1350 different scenarios has demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms in reducing the maximum time needed for the completion of surveillance tasks by drones. The most effective algorithm was the two-group clustering algorithm (TGC), which achieved a success rate of 97.2%, with an average gap of less than 0.001 and an average computation time of 0.016 s. Furthermore, the application of this methodology to a case study of the Daintree Rainforest in Australia showcases the potential and real-world applicability of the proposed system, highlighting its performance and adaptability.

In the undertaken study, we have used a customized dataset termed ``Cardiac-200'' and the benchmark dataset ``PhysioNet.'' which contains 1500 heartbeat acoustic event samples (without augmentation) and 1950 samples (with augmentation) heartbeat acoustic events such as normal, murmur, extrasystole, artifact, and other unlabeled heartbeat acoustic events. The primary reason for designing a customized dataset, ``cardiac-200,'' is to balance the total number of samples into categories such as normal and abnormal heartbeat acoustic events. The average duration of the recorded heartbeat acoustic events is 10-12 s. In the undertaken study, we have analyzed and evaluated various heartbeat acoustic events using audio processing libraries such as Chromagram, Chroma-cq, Chroma-short-time Fourier transform (STFT), Chroma-cqt, and Chroma-cens to extract more information from the recorded heartbeat sound signals. The noise removal process has been carried out using local binary pattern (LBP) methodology. The noise-robust heartbeat acoustic images are classified using long short-term memory (LSTM)-convolutional neural network (CNN), recurrent neural network (RNN), LSTM, Bi-LSTM, CNN, K-means Clustering, and support vector machine (SVM) methods. The obtained results have shown that the proposed InfusedHeart Framework had outclassed all the other customized machine learning and deep learning approaches such as RNN, LSTM, Bi-LSTM, CNN, K-means Clustering, and SVM-based classification methodologies. The proposed Knowledge-infused Learning Framework has achieved an accuracy of 89.36% (without augmentation), 93.38% (with augmentation), and a standard deviation of 10.64 (without augmentation), and 6.62 (with augmentation). Furthermore, the proposed framework has been tested for various signal-to-noise ratio conditions such as SignaltoNoiseRatio0, SignaltoNoiseRatio3, SignaltoNoiseRatio6, SignaltoNoiseRatio9, SignaltoNoiseRatio12, SignaltoNoiseRatio15, and SignaltoNoiseRatio18. In the end, we have shown a detailed comparison of texture and without texture approaches and have discussed future enhancements and prospective ways for future directions.

Applying artificial intelligence (AI) to data from Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) devices is a novel direction in geological studies. However, privacy and security concerns hinder the sharing of data, thus affecting the performance of current AI-based approaches. In this article, we propose a novel data management style to address the privacy and security issues in joint hydrocarbon explorations. Federated learning can facilitate the analysis of multiple datasets without the need to share them, protecting private information of different companies in a virtual joint venture. We use the inference of petroleum reservoirs in karst stratigraphy as a case study. A federated learning-based enterprise data management framework is proposed to virtually integrate the information from different organizations. Our key contributions are summarized as follows. 1) A method for karst identification and inference is proposed, which uses neural networks to recognize the size of petroleum reservoirs in different karst areas. 2) A federated learning algorithm is applied to virtually aggregate data samples from different companies. 3) The performance of the new privacy-preserving integration model is compared with those of the individual/local deep learning models. Our results show that the proposed approach can substantially improve the accuracy of petroleum reservoir explorations.

The abnormal growth of malignant or nonmalignant tissues in the brain causes long-term damage to the brain. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is one of the most common methods of detecting brain tumors. To determine whether a patient has a brain tumor, MRI filters are physically examined by experts after they are received. It is possible for MRI images examined by different specialists to produce inconsistent results since professionals formulate evaluations differently. Furthermore, merely identifying a tumor is not enough. To begin treatment as soon as possible, it is equally important to determine the type of tumor the patient has. In this paper, we consider the multiclass classification of brain tumors since significant work has been done on binary classification. In order to detect tumors faster, more unbiased, and reliably, we investigated the performance of several deep learning (DL) architectures including Visual Geometry Group 16 (VGG16), InceptionV3, VGG19, ResNet50, InceptionResNetV2, and Xception. Following this, we propose a transfer learning(TL) based multiclass classification model called IVX16 based on the three best-performing TL models. We use a dataset consisting of a total of 3264 images. Through extensive experiments, we achieve peak accuracy of 95.11%, 93.88%, 94.19%, 93.88%, 93.58%, 94.5%, and 96.94% for VGG16, InceptionV3, VGG19, ResNet50, InceptionResNetV2, Xception, and IVX16, respectively. Furthermore, we use Explainable AI to evaluate the performance and validity of each DL model and implement recently introduced Vison Transformer (ViT) models and compare their obtained output with the TL and ensemble model.

Smart Parking Services (SPSs) enable cruising drivers to find the nearest parking lot with available spots, reducing the traveling time, gas, and traffic congestion. However, drivers risk the exposure of sensitive location data during parking query to an untrusted Smart Parking Service Provider (SPSP). Our motivation arises from a repetitive query to an updated database, i.e., how a driver can be repetitively paired with a previously-matched-but-forgotten lot. Meanwhile, we aim to achieve repetitive query in an oblivious and unlinkable manner. In this work, we present Mnemosyne2 : decentralized and privacy-preserving smart parking with secure repetition and full verifiability. Specifically, we design repetitive, oblivious, and unlinkable Secure k Nearest Neighbor (SkNN) with basic verifiability (correctness and completeness) for encrypted-andupdated databases. We build a local Ethereum blockchain to perform driver-lot matching via smart contracts. To adapt to the lot count update, we resort to the immutable blockchain for advanced verifiability (truthfulness). Last, we utilize decentralized blacklistable anonymous credentials to guarantee identity privacy. Finally, we formally define and prove privacy and security. We conduct extensive experiments over a real-world dataset and compare Mnemosyne2 with existing work. The results show that a query only needs 8 seconds (175 ms) on average for service waiting (verification) among 500 drivers.

Abstract Recently, transforming windows files into images and its analysis using machine learning and deep learning have been considered as a state‐of‐the art works for malware detection and classification. This is mainly due to the fact that image‐based malware detection and classification is platform independent, and the recent surge of success of deep learning model performance in image classification. Literature survey shows that convolutional neural network (CNN) deep learning methods are successfully employed for image‐based windows malware classification. However, the malwares were embedded in a tiny portion in the overall image representation. Identifying and locating these affected tiny portions is important to achieve a good malware classification accuracy. In this work, a multi‐headed attention based approach is integrated to a CNN to locate and identify the tiny infected regions in the overall image. A detailed investigation and analysis of the proposed method was done on a malware image dataset. The performance of the proposed multi‐headed attention‐based CNN approach was compared with various non‐attention‐CNN‐based approaches on various data splits of training and testing malware image benchmark dataset. In all the data‐splits, the attention‐based CNN method outperformed non‐attention‐based CNN methods while ensuring computational efficiency. Most importantly, most of the methods show consistent performance on all the data splits of training and testing and that illuminates multi‐headed attention with CNN model's generalizability to perform on the diverse datasets. With less number of trainable parameters, the proposed method has achieved an accuracy of 99% to classify the 25 malware families and performed better than the existing non‐attention based methods. The proposed method can be applied on any operating system and it has the capability to detect packed malware, metamorphic malware, obfuscated malware, malware family variants, and polymorphic malware. In addition, the proposed method is malware file agnostic and avoids usual methods such as disassembly, de‐compiling, de‐obfuscation, or execution of the malware binary in a virtual environment in detecting malware and classifying malware into their malware family.

The heterogeneous nature of the Industrial Internet of Thing (IIoT) has a considerable impact on the development of an effective Intrusion Detection System (IDS). The proliferation of linked devices results in multiple inputs from industrial sensors. IDS faces challenges in analyzing the features of the traffic and identifying anonymous behavior. Due to the unavailability of a comprehensive feature mapping method, the present IDS solutions are non-usable to identify zero-day vulnerabilities. In this paper, we introduce the first comprehensive IDS framework that combines an efficient feature-mapping technique and cascading model to solve the above-mentioned problems. We call our proposed solution deeP learnIG model intrusioN detection in indUStrial internet-of things (PIGNUS). PIGNUS integrates Auto Encoders (AE) to select optimal features and Cascade Forward Back Propagation Neural Network (CFBPNN) for classification and attack detection. The cascading model uses interconnected links from the initial layer to the output layer and determines the normal and abnormal behavior patterns and produces a perfect classification. We execute a set of experiments on five popular IIoT datasets: gas pipeline, water storage tank, NSLKDD+, UNSW-NB15, and X-IIoTID. We compare PIGNUS to the state-of-the-art models in terms of accuracy, False Positive Ratio (FPR), precision, and recall. The results show that PIGNUS provides more than 95% accuracy, which is 25% better on average than the existing models. In the other parameters, PIGNUS shows 20% improved FPR, 10% better recall, and 10% better in precision. Overall, PIGNUS proves its efficiency as an IDS solution for IIoTs. Thus, PIGNUS is an efficient solution for IIoTs.

Edge computing (EC) offers cloud-like services at the edge of mobile networks to satisfy the delay-sensitive and rapid computation applications in meeting the demands of rapidly increasing mobile devices and other Internet of Things. EC is known to be constrained with limited resources that its efficacy greatly depends on an effective and efficient resource allocation to provide optimal resource utilization. Focusing on the fact, this article presents an adaptive resource allocation mechanism, abbreviated as A-PBRA, for effective resources utilization in the EC paradigm. To realize optimal utilization, the available resources are allocated dynamically (adaptability) by considering the nature of the incoming requests. The proposed scheme shall adapt to the resource demands and priorities of the incoming requests. After identifying the received request which can be either the priority-based or normal request, each of them is processed with three possibilities. The available resources are thus allocated as per the priorities of the incoming requests to satisfy the constraints accordingly. The proposed mechanism is adaptable to a maximum number of incoming requests along with optimizing the utilization of limited resources at the edge node. Extensive simulations were performed through ifogsim to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. Critical comparisons were made against closely related algorithms and techniques, i.e., the novel bioinspired hybrid algorithm and the CORA-GT. The simulation results from the proposed scheme optimistically showing that it performed better in terms of resources utilization, average response time, task execution time, and energy consumption.

A literature survey shows that the number of malware attacks is gradually growing over the years due to the growing trend of Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) devices. To detect and classify malware attacks, automated malware detection and classification is an essential subsystem in healthcare cyber-physical systems. This work proposes an attention-based multidimensional deep learning (DL) approach for a cross-architecture IoMT malware detection and classification system based on byte sequences extracted from Executable and Linkable Format (ELF; formerly named Extensible Linking Format) files. The DL approach automates the feature design and extraction process from unstructured byte sequences. In addition, the proposed approach facilitates the detection of the central processing unit (CPU) architecture of the ELF file. A detailed experimental analysis and its evaluation are shown on the IoMT cross-architecture benchmark dataset. In all the experiments, the proposed method showed better performance compared with those obtained from several existing methods with an accuracy of 95% for IoMT malware detection, 94% for IoMT malware classification, and 95% for CPU architectures classification. The proposed method also suggests a similar performance with an accuracy of 94% on the Microsoft malware dataset. Experimental results on two malware datasets indicate that the proposed method is robust and generalizable in cross-architecture IoMT malware detection, classification, and CPU architectures classification in healthcare cyber-physical systems.

This work aims to develop a framework of automatic medical fraud detection (AMFD) which can be deployed in healthcare industry. To address the issue that the medical fraud labels are insufficient in both size and classes for training a good AMFD model, this work proposes a novel Variational AutoEncoder-based Relational Model (VAERM) which can simultaneously exploit Patient-Doctor relational network and one-class fraud labels to improve the fraud detection. Then, the proposed VAERM coupled with active learning strategy can assist healthcare industry experts to conduct cost-effective fraud investigation. Finally, we propose an online model updating method to reduce the computation and memory requirement while preserving the predictive performance. The proposed framework is tested in a real world dataset and it empirically outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in both automatic fraud detection and fraud investigation tasks.

Vehicular Digital Forensics (VDF) is essential to enable liability cognizance of accidents and fight against crimes. Ensuring the authority to timely gather, analyze, and trace data promotes vehicular investigations. However, adversaries crave the identity of the data provider/user, damage the evidence, violate evidence jurisdiction, and leak evidence. Therefore, protecting privacy and evidence accountability while guaranteeing access control and traceability in VDF is no easy task. To address the above-mentioned issues, we propose Eunomia: an anonymous and secure VDF scheme based on blockchain. It preserves privacy with decentralized anonymous credentials without trusted third parties. Vehicular data and evidence are uploaded by data providers to the blockchain and stored in distributed data storage. Each investigation is modeled as a finite state machine with state transitions being executed by smart contracts. Eunomia achieves fine-grained evidence access control via ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption and Bulletproofs. A user must hold specific attributes and a temporary-and-unexpired token/warrant to retrieve data from the blockchain. Finally, a secret key is embedded into data to trace the traitor if any evidence breach happens. We use a formal analysis to demonstrate the strong privacy and security properties of Eunomia. Moreover, we build a prototype in a WiFi-based Ethereum test network to evaluate its performance.

Security and privacy issues have become a major hindrance to the broad adoption of Ride-Hailing Services (RHSs). In this article, we introduce a new collusion attack initiated by the Ride-Hailing Service Provider (RHSP) and a driver that could easily link the real riders and their anonymous requests (credentials). Besides this attack, existing work requires heavy computations to execute user matching, and it is challenging for riders to verify matching results. Meanwhile, a malicious driver may cancel an assigned ride order due to its short distance. To address these issues, we present a RHS system named Nereus to support collusion resistance, efficiency, verifiability, and accountability. First, we integrate a smart contract into a Software Guard Extensions (SGX) enclave to establish aprivate smart contractfor collusion resistance. We use a Bloom filter to achieve efficient matching. Second, we leverage privacy-preserving range query and Merkle proofs to make matching results verifiable. Meanwhile, we adopt short group signatures to provide anonymous authentication and deposit commitments to hold the runaway driver accountable. We formally state and prove the security and privacy of Nereus. We build a prototype based on Ethereum and SGX to conduct extensive performance analysis in regard to gas costs, computational costs, and communication overhead. Experimental results show that Nereus significantly improves over existing schemes in terms of computational costs.

Building a sustainable transportation system without involving international oil companies (IOCs) is an unrealistic feat. To date, no study has determined the best IOC and low-performing ones with respect to sustainable oil transportation, which is considered a benchmarking challenge requiring an urgent solution. Despite this limitation, the benchmarking of IOCs falls under the complex multicriteria decision making (MCDM) because of the use of several evaluation criteria and their varying datasets and the varying importance of these criteria. Moreover, the issues involving the use of imprecise, unclear, and ambiguous information remain unresolved in the existing multiattribute decision-making methods. The robustness of the multiobjective optimization on the basis of ratio analysis (MULTIMOORA, i.e., an updated version of MOORA) plus full-multiplicative form method and that of the fuzzy-weighted with zero inconsistency (FWZIC) method have been proven. Therefore, in this article, we propose a novel benchmarking of oil companies by extending the linear Diophantine fuzzy rough sets (LDFRSs) into the MCDM methods to help build a sustainable transportation industry. The proposed methodology consists of two phases. The initial phase involves assigning values to the evaluation criteria of IOCs to formulate the evaluation decision matrix. The second phase involves the development of two fuzzy MCDM methods, namely, the LDFRS with the FWZIC method (hereafter called LDFRS–FWZIC) for weighting the criterion of each IOC and the LDFRS with the MULTIMOORA method (hereafter called LDFRS–MULTIMOORA) for benchmarking the IOCs. The IOCs were evaluated based on 2 criteria, 9 subcriteria, and 47 measurement items by 483 experts from 11 IOCs. Results revealed the following: 1) LDFRS–FWZIC can effectively weigh the evaluation criteria of IOCs. The highest final weight of 0.2594 was for “cost leadership” (C2-1), whereas the lowest weights of 0.1148 was for “priority of other external matters” (C1-2) and “insufficient supply”(C1-4), and 2) LDFRS–MULTIMOORA can successfully benchmark the IOCs. IOC11 ranked first, followed by IOC10 and IOC3 in the second and third ranks, respectively. IOC4 ranked the lowest (rank= 11). A sensitivity analysis was conducted to determine the robustness of the developed fuzzy MCDM methods.

The cloud-based data sharing technology with cryptographic primitives enables data owners to outsource data into paradigms and privately share information with arbitrary recipients without geographic barriers. However, we argue that most of existing efforts for outsourced data sharing are either inefficient, inflexible, or incompletely secure due to the following problems: (1) lack of efficient strategies for dynamically designating target ciphertexts to multiple recipients; (2) how to hide the identity of the recipient and (3) how to verify the correctness of outsourced ciphertext transformation without any denial. To the best of our knowledge, no previous work has thoroughly explored the above three issues, motivating us to design such an efficient and comprehensively secure outsourced data sharing mechanism. We design VF-PPBA, the first Verifiable, Fair and Privacy-preserving Broadcast Authorization framework for flexible data sharing in clouds. In more detail, we first invent a new primitive, privacy-preserving multi-recipient broadcast proxy re-encryption (PPMR-BPRE), which enables the authorization of a given ciphertext to different recipients with efficient ciphertext transformation, and further guarantees that any malicious adversary deduces nothing about the identity of the recipient. Then, we present VF-PPBA for flexible data sharing with PPMR-BPRE as the underlying structure, which in addition to inheriting all the functionalities of PPMR-BPRE, is capable of supporting the verifiability of the outcome correctness of the outsourced conversion task, and being immune to the malicious accusation if the outsourcing outcome is correctly completed. We formalize the adversarial models and render comprehensively strict security proofs to prove the security of our proposed solutions. Its performance is also validated via experimental simulations to showcase the practicability and effectiveness.

Data sharing technologies enable users to outsource data and privately share information with arbitrary recipients without geographic barriers. However, existing efforts for secure data sharing are either inflexible, insufficiently-secure or inefficient. In this paper, we invent PS-ME, the first Privacy-aware and Security-enhanced efficient Matchmaking Encryption (ME) for flexible data sharing. To be more specific, we first formulate an identity-based broadcast matchmaking encryption (IB-BME) for one-to-many data sharing, which enables both participants to specify respective access policies to the encrypted data, such that the data can be revealed by multiple recipients in the case that both access policies are satisfied. In IB-BME, a general matchmaking transformation solution realizing one-to-many sharing is initialized. We also formulate the PS-ME with the general matchmaking transformation solution of IB-BME as the underlying approach, which in addition to featuring IB-BME’s all desirable properties, enables efficient decryption, identity anonymity and CCA-security, where we address the open problem of ME regarding CCA-security (raised in CRYPTO’2019). Finally, the comprehensively rigorous security proofs indicate the security of the suggested methodologies. The experimental results are also shown to demonstrate their practicability and effectiveness.

Industry 5.0 is more focused on sustainability, people-centredness, and resilience. The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) enable real-time monitoring of equipment status through sensors deployed in dangerous environments to reduce the probability of hazards. However, the devices are vulnerable to malicious attackers or can be tampered with during the transmission of information. Security has therefore become a major concern in the IIoT. In this article, we propose a privacy-preserving multinode collaborative decision-making scheme in IIoT to ensure the validity and integrity of data under the IIoT. This collaborative decision-making solution primarily uses voting to enable accurate monitoring of sensing devices. The scheme is designed based on an efficient aggregate signature and gives a formal proof of security based on the computational Diffie–Hellman problem (CDHP). The final performance analysis phase gives a detailed presentation of the computational overhead of each phase of the protocol.

Mobile edge computing (MEC) and device-to-device (D2D) offloading are two promising paradigms in the industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). In this article, we investigate task co-offloading, where computing-intensive industrial tasks can be offloaded to MEC servers via cellular links or nearby IIoT devices via D2D links. This co-offloading delivers small computation delay while avoiding network congestion. However, erratic movements, the selfish nature of devices and incomplete offloading information bring inherent challenges. Motivated by these, we propose a co-offloading framework, integrating migration cost and offloading willingness, in D2D-assisted MEC networks. Then, we investigate a learning-based task co-offloading algorithm, with the goal of minimal system cost (i.e., task delay and migration cost). The proposed algorithm enables IIoT devices to observe and learn the system cost from candidate edge nodes, thereby selecting the optimal edge node without requiring complete offloading information. Furthermore, we conduct simulations to verify the proposed co-offloading algorithm.

In enterprise management systems (EMS), augmented Intelligence of Things (AIoT) devices generate delay-sensitive and energy-intensive tasks for learning analytics, articulate clarifications, and immersive experiences. To guarantee effective task processing, in this work, we present a cloud-assisted fog computing framework with task offloading and service caching. In the framework, tasks make offloading decisions to determine local processing, fog processing, and cloud processing with the goal of minimal task delay and energy consumption, conditioned on dynamic service caching. To this end, we first propose a distributed task offloading algorithm based on noncooperative game theory. Then, we adopt the 0–1 knapsack method to realize dynamic service caching. At last, we adjust the offloading decisions for the tasks offloaded to the fog server but without caching service support. In addition, we conduct extensive experiments and the results validate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms.

Massive multidimensional health data collected from Internet of Things (IoT) devices are driving a new era of smart health, and with it come privacy concerns. Privacy-preserving data aggregation (PDA) is a proven solution providing statistics while hiding raw data. However, existing PDA schemes ignore the willingness of data owners to share, so data owners may refuse to share data. To increase their willingness to contribute data, we propose an OPtional dimEnsional pRivacy-preserving data Aggregation scheme(OPERA)to provide data contributors with options on sharing dimensions while keeping their choices and data private. OPERA uses selection vectors to represent the decisions of users and count participants dimensionally and achieves data privacy and utility based on a multisecret sharing method and symmetric homomorphic cryptography. Analyses show that in OPERA, the probability of adversaries breaching privacy is less than 4.68e-97. Performance evaluations demonstrate that OPERA is outstanding in computation and practical in communication.

Recent research shows that executable and linkable format (ELF) malware detection models based on deep learning are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. The most commonly used method in previous work is adversarial training to defend adversarial examples. Nevertheless, it is inefficient and only effective for specific adversarial attacks. Given that the perturbation byte insertion positions of existing adversarial malware generation methods are relatively fixed, we propose a new method to detect adversarial ELF malware. Using model interpretation techniques, we analyze the decision-making basis of the malware detection model and extract the features of adversarial examples. We further use anomaly detection techniques to identify adversarial examples. As an add-on module of the malware detection model, the proposed method does not require modifying the original model and does not need to retrain the model. Evaluating results show that the method can effectively defend the adversarial attacks against the malware detection model.

Coexploitation behavior, referring to multiple software vulnerabilities being exploited jointly by one or more exploits, brings enormous challenges to the prevention and remediation of cyberattacks. Leveraging the latest advances in graph-driven intelligence, this article formulates vulnerability coexploitation behavior discovery as a link prediction problem between vulnerability entities within a vulnerability knowledge graph. We propose a modality-aware graph convolutional network (MAGCN) module to embed multimodality entity attributes and topological graph connectivity features into a unified lower dimensional feature space to boost link prediction performance. We further design a graph knowledge transfer learning (GKTL) strategy to transfer knowledge between subgraphs extracted from the same knowledge graph. Experimental results on a real-world dataset containing coexploitation incidents between 1995 and 2021 show that MAGCN achieved 81.34% on theF1 score when applying the GKTL strategy, superior to other graph neural network modules, such as GCN, GraphSAGE, EdgeGCN, and GINGCN.

The papers in this special section focus on federal learning applications for the Internet of Medical Things. Due to to the advancements in Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), wearable devices, remote monitoring of patients is possible like never before. Machine learning and deep learning techniques help the doctors immensely in remotely diagnosing the patients by learning the patterns from the data generated through these devices [1]. The main problem with traditional machine learning (ML)/deep learning (DL) models is that the data from the individual devices, sensors, wearables of patients have to be transferred to the central servers to train the data using the ML/DL models. Due to the sensitive nature of the healthcare data, the aforementioned approach of transferring the patients’ data to the central servers may create serious security and privacy issues.

Trajectory design is of great significance for the intelligent Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) when performing various ground tasks. Though obstacle avoidance, speed control and other movement issues in the UGV navigation have been considered by the current research, the UGV path planning against malicious radio source is off the beaten path. To address such a research gap, we propose a reinforcement learning-based scheme to design UGV trajectory against malicious radio source as well as minimize the movement cost. Firstly, the malicious radio source detection and localization models are introduced after the Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) map establishment. Then, the RSSI Map-based UGV trajectory design problem is formulated, where the movement cost and security risk are both concerned. To solve the formed problem, we propose a reinforcement learning-based trajectory design scheme, whose complexities are analyzed in detail. Finally, experiments are conducted under various parameter settings, where the simulation results evaluate the correctness and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

With the intelligentization of Maritime Transportation System (MTS), Internet of Thing (IoT) and machine learning technologies have been widely used to achieve the intelligent control and routing planning for ships. As an important branch of machine learning, federated learning is the first choice to train an accurate joint model without sharing ships' data directly. However, there are still many unsolved challenges while using federated learning in IoT-enabled MTS, such as the privacy preservation and Byzantine attacks. To surmount the above challenges, a novel mechanism, namely DisBezant, is designed to achieve the secure and Byzantine-robust federated learning in IoT-enabled MTS. Specifically, a credibility-based mechanism is proposed to resist the Byzantine attack in non-iid (not independent and identically distributed) dataset which is usually gathered from heterogeneous ships. The credibility is introduced to measure the trustworthiness of uploaded knowledge from ships and is updated based on their shared information in each epoch. Then, we design an efficient privacy-preserving gradient aggregation protocol based on a secure two-party calculation protocol. With the help of a central server, we can accurately recognise the Byzantine attackers and update the global model parameters privately. Furthermore, we theoretically discussed the privacy preservation and efficiency of DisBezant. To verify the effectiveness of our DisBezant, we evaluate it over three real datasets and the results demonstrate that DisBezant can efficiently and effectively achieve the Byzantine-robust federated learning. Although there are 40% nodes are Byzantine attackers in participants, our DisBezant can still recognise them and ensure the accurate model training.

Traffic problems continue to deteriorate because of increasing population in urban areas that rely on many modes of transportation, the transportation infrastructure has achieved considerable strides in the last several decades. This has led to an increase in congestion control difficulties, which directly affect citizens through air pollution, fuel consumption, traffic law breaches, noise pollution, accidents, and loss of time. Traffic prediction is an essential aspect of an intelligent transportation system in smart cities because it helps reduce overall traffic congestion. This article aims to design and enforce a traffic prediction scheme that is efficient and accurate in forecasting traffic flow. Available traffic flow prediction methods are still unsuitable for real-world applications. This fact motivated us to work on a traffic flow forecasting issue using Vision Transformers (VTs). In this work, VTs were used in conjunction with Convolutional neural networks (CNN) to predict traffic congestion in urban spaces on a city-wide scale. In our proposed architecture, a traffic image is fed to a CNN, which generates feature maps. These feature maps are then fed to the VT, which employs the dual techniques of tokenization and projection. Tokenization is used to convert features into tokens containing Vision information, which are then sent to projection, where they are transformed into feature maps and ultimately delivered to LSTM. The experimental results demonstrate that the vision transformer prediction method based on Spatio-temporal characteristics is an excellent way of predicting traffic flow, particularly during anomalous traffic situations. The proposed technology surpasses traditional methods in terms of precision, accuracy and recall and aids in energy conservation. Through rerouting, the proposed work will benefit travellers and reduce fuel use.

As a promising enabler for edge intelligence, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) have become more and more important in Mobile Edge Computing Networks (MECN), such as communication, computation, collection and control service supply. Although Age of Information (AoI) minimization is indispensable for fresh information collection and computation in the UAV-aided MECN, some attackers can launch attacks to deteriorate the availability of precious channel resources, such as revealed channel access attacks (CAAs). Moreover, recent research has not considered the system’s active probability and security issues concurrently, e.g., CAA, in the average AoI minimization process. In this paper, to deal with this problem, we consider an AoI-oriented channel access problem under CAA with a game theory viewpoint. Firstly, to obtain a MECN-based AoI indicator under CAA, the system model with active probability consideration is established. Next, the channel access-based AoI minimization problem is formulated from the viewpoint of the Ordinary Potential Game (OPG). Furthermore, two algorithms called AACSD and DCASD are proposed to determine channel access strategies, by which the Nash Equilibrium (NE) solution of the OPG could be reached. Finally, experiments are conducted under homogeneous and heterogeneous parameter settings, and the simulation results evaluate the correctness and effectiveness of our proposals.

Urban region heat refers to the extent of which people congregate in various regions when they travel to and stay in a specified place. Predicting urban region heat facilitates broad applications ranging from location-based services to intelligent transportation management. The region heat is essentially characterized by the ‘arrive-stay-leave (ASL)’ behaviors, while it is a challenging task to well capture the spatial-temporal evolution of region heat since the following issues remain: i) ASL behaviors of private cars is usually heterogeneous resulting in a hierarchical distribution of region heat. ii) Urban region heat contains complex spatial-temporal correlations hidden in ASL behaviors and how to collaboratively integrate them is challenging. To address these challenges, we propose a Hierarchical Spatial-Temporal Network (HierSTNet) to forecast urban region heat, which contains two representations, namely, grid region from micro perspective and node region from macro perspective. For the grids, three-dimension spatial and temporal convolutional network (3D-STCNN) is proposed to model multi-scale properties in temporal dimension of ASL behaviors. For the nodes, multi-head graph attention networks are utilized to model the periodicity and spatial heterogeneity among macro region. Hierarchical structures are designed for multi-view modeling spatial-temporal distribution of ASL behaviors, by which they capture small-scale features in micro regions and embeds the global representation into graph propagation. Finally, we design an interaction decoder layer to integrate the external factors and aggregate spatial-temporal information across hierarchical structures. Extensive experiments based on real-world private car trajectory dataset demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of proposed framework.

With the deep integration of the Internet of Things (IoT) technology and the increase of computational power and memory, vehicles can also serve as the infrastructures for Intelligent Transportation System (ITS), e.g., as fog nodes. However, when connecting vehicles to the internet, alongside with the benefits it brings, it also opens many new challenges such as security attacks. Controller Area Network (CAN) is one of the main in-vehicle communication protocols in modern cars. Its lack of sender verification mechanism makes CAN particularly vulnerable to cyber-attacks including masquerade attack. Fingerprinting Electronic Control Units (ECUs) based on hardware characteristics has been proved feasible and effective on defending CAN buses. However, most state-of-the-art works exploited the supervised learning algorithm to identify the transmitter based on the signal characteristics. This makes the decision process hard to understand, and it also limits the deployment on proprietary CAN bus without prior knowledge. To solve this, we design a novel clock-skew-based approach capable of pinpointing the sender and detecting intrusion on proprietary CAN bus. We take a single CAN frame as the object for measurement, and adjust the measuring process such that our approach can be independent of the transmission time of frames. Based on the statistical analysis of data from real vehicles, we propose a novel box-plot algorithm based on score mechanism to filter the raw data. Finally, the clock skews are estimated and accumulated to build a linear model for representing the transmitter ECU. The evaluation results on one CAN prototype and two production vehicles show that our approach is able to well identify and differentiate ECUs on the bus without prior knowledge. The data processed by the proposed box-plot algorithm can describe the hardware characteristics of ECUs precisely. We also show the ability of our approach to protecting the CAN bus against the masquerade attack.

The decentralization and transparency have provided wide acceptance of blockchain technology in various sectors through numerous applications. The claimed security services by blockchain have been proved using various cryptographic techniques, mainly public key infrastructure and digital signatures. However, the use of generic cryptographic primitives using large prime numbers or elliptic curves with logarithms is going to be an issue with quantum computers as those techniques are vulnerable in post-quantum era. Therefore, the paradigm shift from pre-quantum to the post-quantum era has necessitated new cryptographic developments which are robust against quantum attacks and applicable in blockchain for post-quantum decentralization. Therefore, we have presented a solution for post-quantum decentralization in the blockchain. It uses lattices with polynomials for identity-based encryption (IBE) and aggregate signatures for the consensus to ensure efficiency and suitability in post-quantum blockchain applications. We experiment the proposed approach based on delay, throughput, energy consumption and complexity. The comparative results prove that the presented work is efficient.

As a promising enabler for edge intelligence, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are playing a more and more important role in Mobile Edge Computing Networks (MECN), such as ground sensor communication assistance, user data collection, edge computation offloading and remote control services. In UAV-aided MECN, the timeliness of exchange data is a key factor that influences the real-time data-driven decisions at the server-side. Simultaneously, the Age of information (AoI) is also an indicator that reflects the freshness of data in terms of the destination during the communication process. Hence, AoI minimization is a vital goal in the MECN. The most recent work overlooks the possible security issues in the AoI minimization process, especially the revealed channel access attacks (CAAs), which aim to deteriorate network performance from ground to air channels. To overcome this research gap, in this paper, we improve the AoI-oriented channel access problem under CAA from the perspective of game theory. Firstly, a system model with active probability consideration is established to obtain a MECN-based AoI indicator under CAA. Subsequently, by utilizing Ordinary Potential Game (OPG), we formulate the AoI-based channel access optimization problem. Then, to reach the Nash Equilibrium (NE) of the OPG, a learning algorithm called Distributed Channel Access Strategy Determination (DCASD) is proposed to determine the channel access strategies. Finally, we conduct experiments under different parameters to present the better performance of our algorithm as compared with related work.

Considering the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, the government and health sectors are incapable of making fast and reliable decisions, particularly given the various effects of decisions on different contexts or countries across multiple sectors. Therefore, leaders often seek decision support approaches to assist them in such scenarios. The most common decision support approach used in this regard is multiattribute decision-making (MADM). MADM can assist in enforcing the most ideal decision in the best way possible when fed with the appropriate evaluation criteria and aspects. MADM also has been of great aid to practitioners during the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, MADM shows resilience in mitigating consequences in health sectors and other fields. Therefore, this study aims to analyse the rise of MADM techniques in combating COVID-19 by presenting a systematic literature review of the state-of-the-art COVID-19 applications. Articles on related topics were searched in four major databases, namely, Web of Science, IEEE Xplore, ScienceDirect, and Scopus, from the beginning of the pandemic in 2019 to April 2021. Articles were selected on the basis of the inclusion and exclusion criteria for the identified systematic review protocol, and a total of 51 articles were obtained after screening and filtering. All these articles were formed into a coherent taxonomy to describe the corresponding current standpoints in the literature. This taxonomy was drawn on the basis of four major categories, namely, medical (n = 30), social (n = 4), economic (n = 13) and technological (n = 4). Deep analysis for each category was performed in terms of several aspects, including issues and challenges encountered, contributions, data set, evaluation criteria, MADM techniques, evaluation and validation and bibliography analysis. This study emphasised the current standpoint and opportunities for MADM in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and promoted additional efforts towards understanding and providing new potential future directions to fulfil the needs of this study field.

Software similarity in different programming codes is a rapidly evolving field because of its numerous applications in software development, software cloning, software plagiarism, and software forensics. Currently, software researchers and developers search cross-language open-source repositories for similar applications for a variety of reasons, such as reusing programming code, analyzing different implementations, and looking for a better application. However, it is a challenging task because each programming language has a unique syntax and semantic structure. In this paper, a novel tool called Cross-Language Software Similarity (CroLSSim) is designed to detect similar software applications written in different programming codes. First, the Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) features are collected from different programming codes. These are high-quality features that can show the abstract view of each program. Then, Methods Description (MDrep) in combination with AST is used to examine the relationship among different method calls. Second, the Term Frequency Inverse Document Frequency approach is used to retrieve the local and global weights from AST-MDrep features. Third, the Latent Semantic Analysis-based features extraction and selection method is proposed to extract the semantic anchors in reduced dimensional space. Fourth, the Convolution Neural Network (CNN)-based features extraction method is proposed to mine the deep features. Finally, a hybrid deep learning model of CNN-Long-Short-Term Memory is designed to detect semantically similar software applications from these latent variables. The data set contains approximately 9.5K Java, 8.8K C#, and 7.4K C++ software applications obtained from GitHub. The proposed approach outperforms as compared with the state-of-the-art methods.

Internet of Things (IoT) composed of large number of sensing devices with a variety of features applicable for various applications. In such scenarios, due to low data handling capabilities, limited storage, and security aspects, it is quite challenging to protect networks against illegal information access and utilizes storage efficiently. Though researchers provide various solutions for security and data storage, but a few solutions are appropriate for wireless sensor networks (WSNs)-enabled IoTs. Therefore, a blockchain-based decentralized framework integrated with authentication and privacy-preserving schemes is developed for the secure communication in WSNs-enabled IoTs. Registration, certification, and revocation process are employed for the communication with sensor nodes and base station (BS) in a cloud computing environment. In this scheme cluster heads forward the collected information to the BS. Consequently, BS records all the key parameters on the distributed blockchain and large data is forwarded to clouds for the storage. The revoked certificates of all malicious nodes are eliminated from blockchain by BS. The performance of the proposed scheme is scrutinized in terms of detection accuracy, certification delay, computational, and communicational overheads. The simulated results, comparative analysis, and security validation support the superiority of the proposed solution over the existing approaches.

Since the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, a dramatic loss of human life has occurred and this trend presents an unprecedented challenge to public health, economic systems and social operations. Hence, it is urgent for us to take some countermeasures to restrain and dispel epidemic diffusion to the uttermost. Data freshness plays an inevitable role in timely infestor determination during this process. However, existing works pay little attention to optimizing this indicator in health monitoring. To make up this research gap, in this paper, we propose a mixed game-based Age of Information (AoI) optimization scheme, where the edge-based wireless technologies and AI-empowered diagnostic bots are adopted. Firstly, we establish the system model for Epidemic Prevention and Control Center (EPCC)-based health state monitoring network, where ultimate biosensing data is transmitted from AI bots via edge servers. Then, upon deriving AoI expression with a closed form, the minimization goal between edge servers and bots is specified. Simultaneously, we reformulate the AoI optimization problem from the mixed game viewpoint (i.e., coalition formation game and ordinary potential game), and then propose two algorithms for cooperative order-based bot deployment and stochastic learning-based channel selection. Finally, compared with the typical baselines, the experiment result shows our scheme can reach the lower AoI value for biosensing data transmission under different parameter settings.

As one of the most successful industrial realizations of Internet of Things, a smart grid is a smart IoT system that deploys widespread smart meters to capture fine-grained data on residential power usage. Unfortunately, it always suffers diverse privacy attacks, which seriously increases the risk of violating the privacy of customers. Although some solutions have been proposed to address this privacy issue, most of them mainly rely on a trusted party and focus on the sanitization of metering masurements. Moreover, these solutions are vulnerable to advanced attacks. In this paper, we propose a decentralized mechanism for privacy-preserving computation in smart grid called DDP, which leaverages the differential privacy and extends the data sanitization from the value domain to the time domain. Specifically, we inject Laplace noise to the measurements at the end of each customer in a distributed manner, and then use a random permutation algorithm to shuffle the power measurement sequence, thereby enforcing differential privacy after aggregation and preventing the sensitive power usage mode informaton of the customers from being inferred by other parties. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DDP shows an outstanding performance in terms of privacy from the non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) attacks and utility by using two different error analysis.

Deep learning has become a mainstream method of hyperspectral image (HSI) classification. Many DL-based methods exploit spatial-spectral features to achieve better classification results. However, due to the complex backgrounds in HSIs, existing methods usually show unsatisfactory performance for the class pixels located on the land-cover category boundary area. In large part, this is because the network is susceptible to interference by the irrelevant information around the target pixel in the training stage, resulting in inaccurate feature extraction. In this paper, a new multibranch transformer architecture (SST-M) that assembles spatial attention and extracts spectral features is proposed to address this problem. The transformer model has a global receptive field and thus can integrate global spatial position information in the HSI cube. Meanwhile, we design a spatial sequence attention model to enhance the useful spatial location features and weaken invalid information. Considering that HSIs contain considerable spectral information, a spectral feature extraction model is designed to extract discriminative spectral features, replacing the widely used PCA method and obtaining better classification results than it. Finally, inspired by semantic segmentation, a mask prediction model is designed to classify all of the pixels in the HSI cube; this guides the neural network to learn precise pixel characteristics and spatial distributions. To verify the effectiveness of our algorithm (SST-M), quantitative experiments were conducted in three well-known datasets, namely, IP, PU, and KSC. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model achieves better performance than the other state-of-the-art methods.

In recent years, hyperspectral image classification (HIC) algorithm based on deep learning has been widely studied, and has achieved much better results than traditional algorithms. HIC using small samples has gradually become a research hotspot, and the generative adversarial networks (GANs) have become a brilliant application in this field. However, the HIC results based on GAN methods are poor and volatile, since a single loss function cannot accurately measure the distance between the generated samples and the real samples in different hyperspectral images. To resolve this problem, we propose a novel immune evolutionary generative adversarial network (HIEGAN) via leveraging the evolutionary strategy and immune strategy. Specifically, we enhance the performance of the generator in two ways: 1) HIEGAN uses multiple loss functions for calculation and backpropagation, so as to endow the generator with different parameter values and select the best one as the evolution result each time to enter the next iteration and 2) in the training process, we preserve the optimal generator as memory cells to avoid the performance degradation of the generator. Through these changes, HIEGAN overcame the defects of GAN, improved the stability of GAN, and finally improved classification efficiency. At the same time, in order to alleviate the overfitting problem of depth network under small samples, we change convolution and deconvolution into ghost module to reduce the network parameters. Experiments on three classical datasets validate that HIEGAN has encouraging performance in HIC under small samples.

Aiming for minimizing passengers waiting time and vehicles vacancy rate, online car-hailing service systems with fog computing has been deployed in various scenarios. In this paper, we focus on addressing the security and privacy issues in such a promising system by customizing a new cryptographic primitive to provide the following security guarantees: (1) private, fine-grained and bilateral order matching between passengers and drivers; (2) authenticity verification of passengers orders in the form of ciphertext, and (3) temporal assurance of passengers’ ciphertext orders. To the best of our knowledge, no previous system has been designed to meet all three requirements. Existing cryptographic primitives (including forward/puncturable encryption (FE/PE) and attribute based matchmaking encryption (AB-ME)) may be leveraged to partially address some of challenges, but there lacks a comprehensive solution. Moreover, the integration of existing works is hampered by the heterogeneity and the weak coupling between distinct cryptographic primitives. As a result, it is infeasible to directly exploit them for the online car-hailing service. To tackle that, we put forward a new cryptographic primitive called Fine-grained Puncturable Matchmaking Encryption (FP-ME) by modifying AB-ME and incorporating PE technology. FP-ME can simultaneously implement fine-grained and bilateral order matching, the authenticity of passengers orders, and meeting the time constraint of passengers orders. We formalize the adversarial models for the proposed FP-ME and then present rigorous security analysis to prove the security of the proposed system. Additionally, we study performance of the system via simulations to demonstrate its practicability and effectiveness in the real-world applications.

The papers in this special section focus on security and privacy issues associated with Industry 4.0. In 2011, a group of delegates from business and academia, and politics in German initially proposed the conception of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (or Industry 4.0), which aims to improve the competitive ability in the manufacturing industry of their country. Along with the emergence of the Industry 4.0 term, people started introspecting the existing shortcomings in contemporary industrial society. Especially, the technologies of the past generations cannot maintain data explosive requirements in the Internet and telecommunication industry and fuse real-time data, which would increase waste and reduce productivity and overall equipment effectiveness. Industry 4.0 recognizes the importance of this issue and makes full use of large-scale machine-to-machine communication and the Internet of things (IoT) to increase automation, improve communication, and self-monitoring and diagnose issues without human intervention, finally transforming traditional manufacturing and industrial practices into a modern smart organization. However, with the rapid growth of devices, security and privacy issues rise to the surface. A mass amount of data frequently exchanged in the public channel will draw the attention of some people with evil intentions. Moreover, the resource-limited devices without strong cryptographic assurance would be compromised and hacked by adversaries. Hence, assuring the authenticity, integrity, and nonrepudiation of these industrial IoT data is a hot issue for industry 4.0 at present.

Federated learning (FL) is a recent development in artificial intelligence, which is typically based on the concept of decentralized data. As cyberattacks are frequently happening in the various applications deployed in real time, most industrialists are hesitating to move forward in adopting the technology of the Internet of Everything. This article aims to provide an extensive study on how FL could be utilized for providing better cybersecurity and prevent various cyberattacks in real time. We present an extensive survey of the various FL models currently developed by researchers for providing authentication, privacy, trust management, and attack detection. We also discuss few real-time use cases that have been deployed recently and how FL is adopted in them for preserving privacy of data and improving the performance of the system. Based on the study, we conclude this article with some prominent challenges and future directions on which the researchers can focus for adopting FL in real-time scenarios.

Unsupervised signal modulation clustering is becoming increasingly important due to its application in the dynamic spectrum access process of 5G wireless communication and threat detection at the physical layer of Internet of Things. The need for better clustering results makes it a challenge to avoid feature drift and improve feature separability. This article proposes a novel separable loss function to address the issue. Besides, the high-level semantic properties of modulation types make it difficult for networks to extract their features. An autoencoder structure based on the random Fourier feature (RffAe) is proposed to simulate the demodulation process of unknown signals. Combined with the separable loss of RffAe (RffAe-S), it has excellent feature extraction ability. Great experiments were carried out on RADIOML 2016.10 A and RADIOML 2016.10 B. Experimental evaluations on these datasets show that our approach RffAe-S achieves state-of-the-art results compared to classical and the most relevant deep clustering methods.

After Bitcoin’s emergence, blockchain found its way to many industries, including Fintech, energy, and manufacturing. Blockchains consensus algorithms, like Nakamoto’s, are mechanisms to probabilistically guarantee that a transaction is not undone after confirmation. This mechanism requires that no one’s computational power exceeds 50% of the network power. However, recent attacks on blockchains have raised serious questions about their security and whether they can be trusted to be employed in critical infrastructure and Industry 4.0. In this article, we introduce a new category of blockchain attacks which we call “misleading-attacks.” In this type of attack, a fraction of network power is misled so that the attacker reaches her goal. The technique is most effective when miners are rational and algorithm-oriented, similar to machines/agents in future Industry 4.0 or industrial Internet of Things. Moreover, this technique has the potential to be used in inventing new attacks, or can be used in combination with other known attacks. We first analyze a case in which the attacker uses misleading techniques to prevent her newly mined block from becoming orphaned. We show that the proposed technique can push the attack success probability up by 16.42%. In a case study, we demonstrate how the technique promotes the success rate from 29.02% to 45.44%. Initiating the attack will be profitable if the attacker’s power is more than 24% of the network power. By combining this novel technique with bribery attack, we show how the cost ofguaranteed variable-rate bribing with commitmentstrategy can be drastically reduced.

The price gouging or price hike is a worldwide issue, and it is related to inflation. Because of rising prices, people in various countries cannot afford nutritious food or proper treatment. Sometimes shops, restaurants, and transportation service providers charge more than the prescribed product price from buyers. In addition, unauthorized VAT or Tax is taken on products that the government exempts. Another reason for price hikes is bribery, and it occurs in transporting and delivering goods. This article introduces a blockchain-based Internet of Things model to monitor product price hikes and corruption from the Industry 4.0 and blockchain 5.0 point of view. Industries produce and package different products. Wholesalers and retailers purchase products from industrial companies. The primary goal of this article is to propose a blockchain mechanism for monitoring price hikes and corruption where the government can monitor buying and selling between buyers and industrial companies. Here, we have established blockchain-integrated remote database model where blockchain relates to a relational database management system that uses remote database access protocol and Cloud server. This article presents the brief evolution of blockchain and industry generations. Finally, this article provides a next generation blockchain model. An intelligent government connected with Industry 4.0 monitors price hikes and corruption.

The integration between blockchains, Internet-of-Thing (IoT), and smart contracts is an emerging and promising technology. The advantages of this technology have raised the importance of Industrial Internet-of-Thing (IIoT) and have paved the pathway for “Industry 4.0.” Surprisingly, access control has received less attention in IIoTs. Though there are some solutions coming forward to use blockchains for IIoT to enable secure and resilient access control management, the challenge is to satisfy the low-latency requirements of IIoTs for validating and adding the blocks to the chain. Besides, role-based and rule-based access controls in the existing systems can be forged without organizational access controls and compliance. Therefore, we address these problems in this article. In the present work, we proposeDHACS, aDecentralized Hybrid Access Control for Smart contract, for IIoTs. DHACS aims to provide transparency, reliability, and robustness to the existing access control mechanism in IIoTs. The framework is based on blockchain feasibilities that contribute to an interconnected hybrid access control through smart contract provision. It is a novel idea in the domain of IIoTs. We use three access control strategies, role-based, rule-based, and organization-based, to develop a hybrid approach for smart contract in DHACS. The operational transactions along with their access controls are accounted and blocks are made by the transaction pooler and block creator. We use a private blockchain environment; however, it can be extended to a public blockchain or consortium blockchain for geographical distributed dependency. We compare DHACS with three existing approaches in recent time. We measure the performance in terms of computational costs, storage complexity, and energy consumption. DHACS outperforms the others approaches and is considered to be efficient for IIoT applications with more than 30% better efficiency in access control management. To the best of our knowledge, DHACS is the first attempt to use decentralized blockchains with smart contract for hybrid access control in IIoTs.

In medical field, previous patients’ cases are extremely private as well as intensely valuable to current disease diagnosis. Therefore, how to make full use of precious cases while not leaking out patients’ privacy is a leading and promising work especially in future privacy-preserving intelligent medical period. In this article, we investigate how to securely invoke patients’ records from past case-database while protecting the privacy of both current diagnosed patient and the case-database and construct a privacy-preserving medical record searching scheme based on ElGamal Blind Signature. In our scheme, by blinded the healthy data of the patient and the database of the iDoctor, respectively, the patient can securely make self-helped medical diagnosis by invoking past case-database and securely comparing the blinded abstracts of current data and previous records. Moreover, the patient can obtain target searching information intelligently at the same time he knows whether the abstracts match or not instead of obtaining it after matching. It greatly increases the timeliness of information acquisition and meets high-speed information sharing requirements, especially in 5G era. What's more, our proposed scheme achieves bilateral security, that is, whether the abstracts match or not, both of the privacy of the case-database and the private information of the current patient are well protected. Besides, it resists different levels of violent ergodic attacks by adjusting the number of zeros in a bit string according to different security requirements.

Nowadays, the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has remarkably transformed our personal lifestyles and society operations into a novel digital mode, which brings tremendous associations with all walks of life, such as intelligent logistics, smart grid, and smart city. Moreover, with the rapid increase of IIoT devices, a large amount of data is swapped between heterogeneous sensors and devices every moment. This trend increases the risk of eavesdropping and hijacking attacks in communication channels, so maintaining data privacy and security becomes two notable concerns at present. Recently, based on the mechanism of the Schnorr signature, a more secure and lightweight certificateless signature (CLS) protocol is popular for the resource-constrained IIoT protocol design. Nevertheless, we found most of the existing CLS schemes are susceptible to several common security weaknesses such as man-in-the-middle attacks, key generation center compromised attacks, and distributed denial of service attacks. To tackle the challenges mentioned previously, in this article, we propose a novel pairing-free certificateless scheme that utilizes the state-of-the-art blockchain technique and smart contract to construct a novel reliable and efficient CLS scheme. Then, we simulate the Type-I and Type-II adversaries to verify the trustworthiness of our scheme. Security analysis as well as performance evaluation outcomes prove that our design can hold more reliable security assurance with less computation cost (i.e., reduced by around 40.0% at most) and communication cost (i.e., reduced by around 94.7% at most) than other related schemes.

Digital twin is the innovation backbone of the smart manufacturing by delivering virtual representation of the real world. Aiming at constructing virtual representations of visual scenes, scene graph generation is a digital twin task that not only models objects but also infers their relationships. Existing works usually learn coarse global context when predicting relationships leading to excessive redundant information being considered. In this article, we first classify objects into different subgroups according to the degree of correlations with several hub objects. Then, we propose a multihub driven attention network (MHDANet) based on deep learning that drives the information to pass within the subgroups and forces objects to attend more to related objects. Consequently, MHDANet learns compact relation-aware features of visual scenes and predicts accurate and diverse relationships. Experimental results show that MHDANet achieves superb performance on scene graph generation on real-world datasets and especially alleviates the imbalance of predicted relationship categories.

Under the times of the Industrial Internet of Things, the traditional centralized machine learning management method cannot deal with such huge data streams, and the problem of data privacy has aroused widespread concern. In view of these difficulties, in this article, we use the advantages of edge computing and federated learning, combined with the outstanding characteristics of the blockchain, to propose a secure data transmission method. First, we separate the local model updating process from the mobile device independent process; second, we add an edge server so that most of the computation is carried out on the server, which improves the learning efficiency; and finally, we use a distributed architecture of the blockchain to protect data security and privacy. Extensive simulation experiments show that the accuracy of our model can reach 98$\%$. In addition, BC-EdgeFLs interception rate of illegal information can reach 0.8, which has good defensive capabilities. Therefore, the security of data transmission can be strongly guaranteed.

The high computational capability provided by a data center makes it possible to solve complex manufacturing issues and carry out large-scale collaborative cloud manufacturing. Accurately, real-time estimation of the power required by a data center can help resource providers predict the total power consumption and improve resource utilization. To enhance the accuracy of server power models, we propose a real-time energy consumption prediction method called IECL that combines the support vector machine, random forest, and grid search algorithms. The random forest algorithm is used to screen the input parameters of the model, while the grid search method is used to optimize the hyperparameters. The error confidence interval is also leveraged to describe the uncertainty in the energy consumption by the server. Our experimental results suggest that the average absolute error for different workloads is less than 1.4% with benchmark models.

The blockchain-enabled internet of medical things (IoMT) is an emerging paradigm that could provide strong trust establishment and ensure the traceability of data sharing in the IoMT networks. One of the fundamental building blocks for Blockchain is Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA). Nevertheless, when processing a large number of transactions, the verification of multiple signatures will incur cumbersome overhead to the nodes in Blockchain. Although batch verification is able to provide a promising approach that verifies multiple signatures simultaneously and efficiently, the upper bound of batch size is limited to small-scale and the efficiency will drop rapidly as the batch size grows in the state-of-the-art ECDSA batch schemes. Meanwhile, most of the existing researches only focus on improving the efficiency of batch verification algorithms in various cryptosystem while ignoring the identification of invalid signatures, which could cause severe performance degradation when the batch verification fails. Motivated by these observations, this paper proposes an efficient and large-scale batch verification scheme with group testing technology based on ECDSA. The application of the presented protocols in Bitcoin and Hyperledger Fabric has been analyzed as supportive and effective. When the batch verification returns a false result, we utilize group testing technology to improve the efficiency of identifying invalid signatures. Comprehensive simulation results demonstrate that our protocol outperforms the related ECDSA batch verification schemes.

The vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is a platform for exchanging information between vehicles and everything to enhance driver’s driving experience and improve traffic conditions. The reputation system plays an essential role in judging whether to communicate with the target vehicle based on other vehicles’ feedback. However, existing reputation systems ignore the privacy protection of feedback providers. Additionally, traditional VANET based on wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has limited power, storage, and processing capabilities, which cannot meet the real-world demands in a practical VANET deployment. Thus, we attempt to integrate cloud computing with VANET and proposes a privacy-preserving protocol of vehicle feedback (PPVF) for cloud-assisted VANET. In cloud-assisted VANET, we integrate homomorphic encryption and data aggregation technology to design the scheme PPVF, in which with the assistance of the roadside units (RSU), cloud service provider (CSP) obtains the total number of vehicles with the corresponding parameters in the feedback for reputation calculation without violating individual feedback privacy. Simulation results and security analysis confirm that PPVF achieves effective privacy protection for vehicle feedback with acceptable computational and communication burden. Besides, the RSU is capable of handling 1999 messages for every$300ms$, so as the number of vehicles in the communication domain increases, the PPVF has a lower message loss rate.

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) is one of the most promising approaches for the Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). With the rapid increase in the amount of traffic data, deep learning based algorithms have been used extensively in VANETs. The recently proposed federated learning is an attractive candidate for collaborative machine learning where instead of transferring a plethora of data to a centralized server, all clients train their respective local models and upload them to the server for model aggregation. Model quantization is an effective approach to address the communication efficiency issue in federated learning, and yet existing studies largely assume homogeneous quantization for all clients. However, in reality, clients are predominantly heterogeneous, where they support different quantization precision levels. In this work, we propose FedDO – Federated Learning with Double Optimization. Minimizing the drift term in the convergence analysis, which is a weighted sum of squared quantization errors (SQE) over all clients, leads to a double optimization at both clients and server sides. In particular, each client adopts a fully distributed, instantaneous (per learning round) and individualized (per client) quantization scheme that minimizes its own squared quantization error, and the server computes the aggregation weights that minimize the weighted sum of squared quantization errors over all clients. We show via numerical experiments that the minimal-SQE quantizer has a better performance than a widely adopted linear quantizer for federated learning. We also demonstrate the performance advantages of FedDO over the vanilla FedAvg with standard equal weights and linear quantization.

With the tremendous growth of Information and Communications Technology (ICT), Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) have opened the door for many potential applications ranging from smart grids and smart cities to transportation, retail, public safety and networking, healthcare and industrial manufacturing. However, due to communication via public channel occurring among various entities in an industrial CPS (ICPS) with the help of the 5G technology and Software-Defined Networking (SDN), it poses several potential security threats and attacks. To mitigate these issues, we propose a new three-factor user authentication and key agreement scheme (UAKA-5GSICPS) for 5G-enabled SDN based ICPS environment. UAKA-5GSICPS allows an authorized user to access the real-time data directly from some designated Internet of Things (IoT)-based smart devices provided that a successful mutual authentication among them is executed via their controller node in the SDN network. It is shown to be robust against various potential attacks through detailed security analysis including the simulation-based formal security verification. A detailed comparative study with the help of experimental results shows that UAKA-5GSICPS achieves better trade-off among security and functionality features, communication and computation overheads as compared to other existing competing schemes.

With the construction of intelligent transportation, big data with heterogeneous, multi-source and massive characteristics has become an important carrier of cooperative intelligent transportation systems (C-ITS) and plays an important role. Big data in C-ITS can break through the restrictions between regions and entities and then learning cooperatively by sharing data. In addition, the combined efficiency and information integration advantages of big data are conducive to the construction of a comprehensive and three-dimensional traffic information system and can enhance traffic prediction. However, such substantial sensitive data, mainly on the cloud infrastructure, exposes several vulnerabilities like data leakages and privacy breaks, especially when data is shared for cooperative learning purposes. To address this, this paper proposes a forward privacy-preserving scheme, named AFFIRM, for multi-party encrypted sample alignment adopting cooperative learning in C-ITS. By introducing the searchable encryption method, we realize the sample alignment of cooperative learning in the multi-party encrypted data space. AFFIRM ensures encrypted sample alignment under the condition of forward privacy security. We have formally proved that the proposed scheme satisfies both forward security and validity. We have assessed AFFIRM by validating the potential threat of malicious tampering by privacy attackers and malicious personnel search for the aligned sample data and verify it. Finally, we numerically tested and compared AFFIRM against the corresponding ones of some state-of-the-art schemes under various record sizes, servers and processing.

The explosive growth of road vehicles especially the private cars has brought unprecedented pressure to a series of problems in urban transportation systems, such as traffic congestion and environmental pollution. Private cars trajectory data and perceiving their information provide a promising solution to these problems. However, the collection of large-scale trajectory data for private cars with high accuracy and reliability is still delicate tasks in urban environments. In this paper, we propose a low-cost and user-friendly implementation method for achieving large-scale private cars trajectory data acquisition via designing lightweight GPS module and On Board Diagnostics (OBD) reader. To ensure reliable trajectory data acquisition via GPS/OBD integration, we propose an ensemble learning based Gauss Process Regression (GPR) method so as to cope with the non-linearity, non-stationarity and incremental training problems during trajectory collection. We design a classification-type loss (CTL) function and build a regression to classification (R2C) method with Learn++ for realizing ensemble learning. The proposed approach implements incremental learning when new trajectory data arrives and is able to resolve the concept drifting problem. Experiments in real-world urban environment have demonstrated the effectiveness and reliability of the proposed method, it achieves better trajectory prediction performance than the comparative methods under various road conditions in GPS-denied areas.

Multi-access edge computing (MEC) and ultra-dense networking (UDN) are recognized as two promising paradigms for future mobile networks that can be utilized to improve the spectrum efficiency and the quality of computational experience (QoCE) . In this paper, we study the task offloading problem in an MEC-enabled UDN architecture with the aim to minimize the task duration while satisfying the energy budget constraints. Due to the dynamics associated with the environment and parameter uncertainty, designing an optimal task offloading algorithm is highly challenging. Consequently, we propose an online task offloading algorithm based on a state-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning (DRL) technique: asynchronous advantage actor-critic (A3C) . It is worthy of remark that the proposed method requires neither instantaneous channel state information (CSI) nor prior knowledge of the computational capabilities of the base stations. Simulations show that the our method is able to learn a good offloading policy to obtain a near-optimal task allocation while meeting energy budget constraints of mobile devices in the UDN environment.

Because of the powerful computing and storage capability in cloud computing, machine learning as a service (MLaaS) has recently been valued by the organizations for machine learning training over some related representative datasets. When these datasets are collected from different organizations and have different distributions, multi-task learning (MTL) is usually used to improve the generalization performance by scheduling the related training tasks into the virtual machines in MLaaS and transferring the related knowledge between those tasks. However, because of concerns about privacy breaches (e.g., property inference attack and model inverse attack), organizations cannot directly outsource their training data to MLaaS or share their extracted knowledge in plaintext, especially the organizations in sensitive domains. In this article, we propose a novel privacy-preserving mechanism for distributed MTL, namely NOInfer, to allow several task nodes to train the model locally and transfer their shared knowledge privately. Specifically, we construct a single-server architecture to achieve the private MTL, which protects task nodes’ local data even if n-1 out of n nodes colluded. Then, a new protocol for the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) is designed to perform the privacy-preserving model training, which resists the inference attack through the intermediate results and ensures that the training efficiency is independent of the number of training samples. When releasing the trained model, we also design a differentially private model releasing mechanism to resist the membership inference attack. Furthermore, we analyze the privacy preservation and efficiency of NOInfer in theory. Finally, we evaluate our NOInfer over two testing datasets and evaluation results demonstrate that NOInfer efficiently and effectively achieves the distributed MTL.

The Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) is said to revolutionize the travel experience by making it safe, secure, and comfortable for the people. Although vehicles have been automated up to a certain extent, it still has critical security issues that require thorough study and advanced solutions. The security vulnerabilities of ITS allows the attacker to steal the vehicle. Therefore, the identification of drivers is required in order to develop a safe and secure system so that the vehicles can be protected from theft. There are two ways in which a driver can be identified: 1) face recognition of the driver, and 2) based on driving behavior. Face recognition includes image processing of 2-D images and learning of the features, which require high computational power. Drivers are known to have unique driving styles, whose data can be captured by the sensors. Therefore, the second method identifies drivers based on the analysis of the sensor data and it requires comparatively lesser computational power. In this paper, an optimized deep learning model is trained on the sensor data to correctly identify the drivers. The Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) deep learning model is optimized for better performance. The novelty of the approach in this work is the inclusion of hyperparameter tuning using a nature-inspired optimization algorithm, which is an important and essential step in discovering the optimal hyperparameters for training the model which in turn increases the accuracy. The CAN-BUS dataset is used for experimentation and evaluation of the training model. Evaluation parameters such as accuracy, precision score, F1 score, and ROC AUC curve are considered to evaluate the performance of the model.

Traffic monitoring services collect traffic reports and respond to users’ traffic queries. However, the reports and queries may reveal the user’s identity and location. Although different anonymization techniques have been applied to protect user privacy, a new security threat arises, namely, n-by-1 jamming attack, in which an anonymous contributing driver impersonates$n$drivers and uploads$n$normal reports by using$n$reporting devices. Such an attack will mislead the traffic monitoring service provider and further degrade the service quality. Existing traffic monitoring services do not support customized queries, and private information retrieval techniques cannot be applied directly in traffic monitoring. We formally define the new attack and propose a traffic monitoring scheme TraJ to defend the attack and achieve user-defined location privacy. Specifically, we bridge anonymous contributing drivers without disclosing their speed set by using private set intersection. Each RSU collects time traffic reports and structures a weighted proximity graph to filter out malicious colluding drivers. We design a user-defined privacy-preserving query method by encoding complex road network. We leverage the uploading phase from private aggregation to collect traffic conditions and allow requesting drivers to dynamically and privately query traffic conditions. We provide a formal analysis of TraJ to prove its privacy and security properties. We also construct a prototype based on a real-world dataset and Android smartphones to demonstrate its feasibility and efficiency. A formal analysis demonstrates the privacy and security properties. Extensive experiments illustrate the performance and defense efficacy.

Industrial Internet of Things is focused to improve the performance of smart factories through automation and scalable functions. IoT paradigm, information and communication technology, and intelligent computing are assimilated as a single entity for industrial automation, optimization, sharing and security, and scalability. In a view of the security requirement in smart industry data sharing through IoT, this article introduces a blockchain-assisted secure data sharing (BSDS) model. This model is responsible for administering inbound and outbound security in data acquisition and dissemination. The inbound acquisition is first classified using recurrent learning to identify adverse sequences in data dissemination. In the outbound security measure, end-to-end authentication based on the blockchain information of reputation and sequence differentiation is engaged. The blockchain paradigm controls the data gathering and dissemination instances through the classification and integrity verification in both the industry and processing terminals. For this purpose, the functions of the blockchain are riven for data gathering and monitoring in the smart industry whereas integrity and sequence verification is performed by the nonmining blockchain terminal in the processing environment. The integrated security measures are capable of maximizing the response rate by confining false alarm progression, failure rate, and time delay. Statistical analysis shows that the BSDS achieves a 5.67% high response rate and reduces the failure rate by 2.14%. Further, it achieves 3.12%, maximizes response rate by 6.63%, and reduces delay by 11.91%, respectively.

This study evaluated the benchmarking process of active queue management (AQM) methods, which consider a multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) problem using multidimensional criteria. Academic studies have benchmarked the AQM methods using MCDM techniques. However, these studies have used existing MCDM techniques, which face considerable theoretical challenges. The latest MCDM method called fuzzy decision by opinion score (FDOSM) was published in the Journal of Applied Soft Computing in 2020 to address the theoretical challenges of the existing MCDM methods. However, FDOSM continues to encounter serious issues. That is, it exclusively depends on the direct aggregation MCDM approach based on arithmetic mean (AM) operator. However, performing other operators (i.e., geometric mean, harmonic mean, and root mean square), in addition to applying other MCDM approaches (i.e., distance measurement and compromise rank), may result in different ranking results. Hence, this study mainly proposes an extension of FDOSM through the following aspects: (1) application of different aggregation techniques in the direct aggregation MCDM approach, (2) discussion of the effectiveness of each type on the final AQM benchmarking, and (3) use of varying MCDM approaches on FDOSM to reach the optimum result when benchmarking the AQM methods. The current research methodology is based on two sequential phases. The first phase provides the decision matrix used in benchmarking the AQM methods. The decision matrix was constructed based on the AQM evaluation criteria and a list of AQM methods. The second phase presents two stages, namely, data transformation unit and data processing. Findings of the AQM benchmarking are as follows. (1) In the individual FDOSM, two main configurations are recommended when using the AQM benchmarking: direct aggregation MCDM approach with AM operator and compromise rank approach. Benchmarking results of both configurations based on six decision makers are nearly similar, with the AQM BLUE method being ranked the best. The exception is for the results of the compromise rank approach based on the third decision maker, which revealed that the AQM ERED method is the best. (2) Results of the group FDOSM showed a relatively similar order for the AQM methods in both configurations, with the AQM BLUE method being the best. (3) Lastly, significant differences were found among the groups' scores, thereby indicating the validity of the FDOSM-based AQM benchmarking results.

The benchmarking of smart e-tourism data management applications falls under the problem of multicriteria decision-making (MCDM). This claim is supported by three issues: 12 smart key concepts need to be considered in the evaluation, criteria importance, and data variation among these criteria. Thus, an MCDM solution is essential to overcome problem complexity. To end this, this study presents a decision-making framework on the basis of the extension of interval type 2 trapezoidal-fuzzy weighted with zero inconsistency (IT2TR-FWZIC) integrated with the Vlsekriterijumska Optimizcija I Kaompromisno Resenje (VIKOR) method for evaluating and benchmarking the smart e-tourism data management applications. Our methodology comprises two consecutive phases. In the first phase, a decision matrix is constructed using the intersection between the 12 key concepts and smart e-tourism data management applications of each category and subcategory in smart e-tourism. In the second phase, the integration of the IT2TR-FWZIC formulation and VIKOR is presented to compute the weights for the 12 key concepts and benchmark the smart e-tourism data management applications for each category. The results are as follows: (1) A clear difference is found among the criteria weights (12 smart key concepts). Specifically, the real-time criterion achieves the highest importance weight (0.098), whereas augmented reality obtains the lowest weight (0.068). The context-awareness and recommender systems have the same weight value (0.087), and the other eight criteria are distributed in between. (2) The smart e-tourism data management applications are evaluated and benchmarked effectively per category and subcategories. (3) Benchmarked applications in each category are subjected to a systematic ranking in the evaluation process. The sensitivity analysis has shown high correlation outcomes to the systematic ranking results over the 31 scenarios of criteria weight changing. Moreover, a comparative analysis of the proposed work with other existing studies is also discussed.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Data Analytics play a crucial role in building a digitalized society that is ethical and inclusive. AI is a simulation that is trained to learn and mimic human behaviour. These AI algorithms are capable of learning from their mistakes and doing tasks that are comparable to those performed by humans. AI will have a significant impact on our quality of life as it develops. The main aim of any tool and approach is to simplify human effort and aid us in making better decisions. Data Analytics helps in analyzing raw data in order to draw inferences from it. These techniques and processes have been automated in order to deal with raw data, which is intended for human consumption. The combination of both these techniques will help humans to evolve further in field of research and will enhance the decision making process…

In the era of the Internet of Things (IoT), people access many applications through smartphones for controlling smart devices. Therefore, such a centralized node must follow a robust access control mechanism so that an intruder cannot control the connected devices. Recent reports suggest that password can be used as an authentication factor for accessing the smart setups. However, this static information can be compromised under the light of different machine learning (ML)-empowered attack mechanisms. Alarmingly, different sensors used in the IoT setup can also expose this static information to the adversaries. Password-based authentication that uses a challenge-response strategy is an effective solution for handling such threat scenarios. In this article, at first, we show that no existing usable challenge-response protocol is safe to be used in the public area network. Following this, we propose a challenge-response protocol that is more secure to use in the public domain. By using eight classifiers, we show that a learning-based threat specific to our protocol has a marginal impact on the method's security standard. The discussion in this article also suggests that the proposed protocol has usability and security advantages compared to the existing state of the art (e.g., reduces the number of interactions between the user and verifier by a factor of 0.5).

Authentication protocols are powerful tools to ensure confidentiality as an important feature of Internet of Things (IoT). The Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack is one of the significant threats to availability, as another essential feature of IoT, which deprives users of services by consuming the energy of IoT nodes. On the other hand, computational intelligence algorithms can be applied to solve such issues in the network and cyber domains. Motivated by this, this article links these concepts. To do so, we analyze two lightweight authentication protocols, present a DoS attack inspired by users' misbehavior and suggest a solution called received signal strength, which is easy to compute, applicable for resisting against different kinds of vulnerabilities in Internet protocols, and feasible for practical implementations. We implement it on two scenarios for locating attackers, investigate the effects of IoT devices' internal error on locating, and propose an optimization problem to finding the exact location of attackers, which is efficiently solvable for computational intelligence algorithms, such as TLBO. Besides, we analyze the solutions for unreliable results of accurate devices and provide a solution to detect attackers with less than 12-cm error and the false alarm probability of 0.7%.

Ultrareliable and low-latency communication (URLLC) is a prerequisite for the successful implementation of the Internet of Controllable Things. In this article, we investigate the potential of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) for joint subcarrier-power allocation to achieve low latency and high reliability in a general form of device-to-device (D2D) networks, where each subcarrier can be allocated to multiple D2D pairs and each D2D pair is permitted to utilize multiple subcarriers. We first formulate the above problem as a Markov decision process and then propose a double deep $Q$ -network (DQN)-based resource allocation algorithm to learn the optimal policy in the absence of full instantaneous channel state information (CSI). Specifically, each D2D pair acts as a learning agent that adjusts its own subcarrier-power allocation strategy iteratively through interactions with the operating environment in a trial-and-error fashion. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves near-optimal performance in real time. It is worth mentioning that the proposed algorithm is especially suitable for cases where the environmental dynamics are not accurate and the CSI delay cannot be ignored.

6G technology enables artificial intelligence (AI)-based massive IoT to manage network resources and data with ultra high speed, responsive network, and wide coverage. However, many AI-enabled Internet-of-Things (AIoT) systems are vulnerable to adversarial example attacks. Therefore, designing robust deep learning models that can be deployed on resource-constrained devices has become an important research topic in the field of 6G-enabled AIoT. In this article, we propose a method for automatically searching for robust and efficient neural network structures for AIoT systems. By introducing a skip connection structure, a feature map with reduced front-end influence can be used for calculations during the classification process. Additionally, a novel type of densely connected search space is proposed. By relaxing this space, it is possible to search for network structures efficiently. In addition, combined with adversarial training and model delay constraints, we propose a multiobjective gradient optimization method to realize the automatic searching of network structures. Experimental results demonstrate that our method is effective for AIoT systems and superior to state-of-the-art neural architecture search algorithms.

Summary In the competing era of online industries, understanding customer feedback and satisfaction is one of the important concern for any business organization. The well‐known social media platforms like Twitter are a place where customers share their feedbacks. Analyzing customer feedback is beneficial, as it provides an advantage way of unveiling customer interests. The proposed system, namely Senti‐eSystem, aims at the development of sentiment‐based eSystem using hybridized Fuzzy and Deep Neural Network for Measuring Customer Satisfaction to assist business organizations for improving the quality of their services and products. The proposed approach initially deploys a Bidirectional Long Short Term Memory with attention mechanism to predict the sentiment polarity that is positive and negative, followed by Fuzzy logic approach to determine the customer satisfaction level, which further strengthens the capabilities of the proposed approach. The system achieves an accuracy of 92.86%, outperforming the previous state‐of‐art lexicon‐based approaches. Moreover, the effectiveness of the proposed system is also validated by applying the statistical test.

With the recent advancement of smartphone technology in the past few years, smartphone usage has increased on a tremendous scale due to its portability and ability to perform many daily life tasks. As a result, smartphones have become one of the most valuable targets for hackers to perform cyberattacks, since the smartphone can contain individuals’ sensitive data. Smartphones are embedded with highly accurate sensors. This article proposes BetaLogger , an Android-based application that highlights the issue of leaking smartphone users’ privacy using smartphone hardware sensors (accelerometer, magnetometer, and gyroscope). BetaLogger efficiently infers the typed text (long or short) on a smartphone keyboard using Language Modeling and a Dense Multi-layer Neural Network (DMNN). BetaLogger is composed of two major phases: In the first phase, Text Inference Vector is given as input to the DMNN model to predict the target labels comprising the alphabet, and in the second phase, sequence generator module generate the output sequence in the shape of a continuous sentence. The outcomes demonstrate that BetaLogger generates highly accurate short and long sentences, and it effectively enhances the inference rate in comparison with conventional machine learning algorithms and state-of-the-art studies.

The perceptual experience of next-generation wireless networks is nowadays coexisting with a unified heterogeneous system. It uses advanced internet protocol (IP) features with scalable infrastructure to optimize the efficiency rate of the core networks. Of late, the Internet-of-Things has played a significant role in the growth of smart devices that derive a forward and backward interface to provide a low-rate data flow. Moreover, a software-defined network (SDN) is openly chosen to explore the promising features such as controller and switches to separate the control and data plane. To fulfill the standard constraints of 6G networks, this article presents dynamic-driven congestion control and segment rerouting. It has two essential purposes: 1) to mitigate the flow rate and signal congestion and 2) to enhance the monitoring process and path adjustment. The approach of Deleroi superimposed, forward-backward interface, and segment rerouting have been implemented and configured in the IMSCore platform that examines the quality metrics such as throughput rate and transmission delay. To probe the signaling traffic and congestion rate, two superposition principles were derived that can minimize the transmission rate and signaling congestion to achieve the demands of the media zone.

Mobile crowdsensing (MCS) is an appealing sensing paradigm that leverages the sensing capabilities of smart devices and the inherent mobility of device owners to accomplish sensing tasks with the aim of constructing powerful industrial systems. Incentivizing mobile users (MUs) to participate in sensing activities and contribute high-quality data is of paramount importance to the success of MCS services. In this article, we formulate the competitive interactions between a sensing platform (SP) and MUs as a multistage Stackelberg game with the SP as the leader player and the MUs as the followers. Given the unit prices announced by MUs, the SP calculates the quantity of sensing time to purchase from each MU by solving a convex optimization problem. Then, each follower observes the trading records and iteratively adjusts their pricing strategy in a trial-and-error manner based on a multiagent deep reinforcement learning algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method.

Smart cities' vision will encompass connected industrial vehicles, which will offer data-driven and intelligent services to the user. Such interaction within dispersed connected objects are sometimes referred as the industrial Internet-of-Vehicles (IIoV). The prime motivation of an intelligent transportation system (ITS) is ensuring the safety of the drivers and offering a comfortable experience to the user. However, such complex infrastructures opens broad attack surfaces to the adversaries, which can remotely exploit and control the critical mechanics in the smart vehicles, including engine and brake systems. Security and privacy concerns are significant barriers to the wide adoption of this revolutionary technology that has to be addressed before a comprehensive implementation of the real vision of ITS. This article is a stepping stone to address access control issues in the IIoV ecosystem and propose a formal attribute-based access control system (referred to ITS-ABACG). The proposed model introduces the notion of groups, which are assigned to various smart entities based on the different attributes. It also offers the implementation of fine-grained security policies and considers individualized privacy preferences along with system-wide policies to accept or reject notification, alerts, and advertisements from different participating smart entities. We present the prototype implementation of our proposed model in the Amazon Web Services IoT platform together with extensive performance to reflect the practicality and wide-scale adoption of the proposed system.

Industry 5.0 is the digitalization, automation and data exchange of industrial processes that involve artificial intelligence, Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), and Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems (I-CPS). In healthcare, I-CPS enables the intelligent wearable devices to gather data from the real-world and transmit to the virtual world for decision-making. I-CPS makes our lives comfortable with the emergence of innovative healthcare applications. Similar to any other IIoT paradigm, I-CPS capable healthcare applications face numerous challenging issues. The resource-constrained nature of wearable devices and their inability to support complex security mechanisms provide an ideal platform to malevolent entities for launching attacks. To preserve the privacy of wearable devices and their data in an I-CPS environment, we propose a lightweight mutual authentication scheme. Our scheme is based on client-server interaction model that uses symmetric encryption for establishing secured sessions among the communicating entities. After mutual authentication, the privacy risk associated with a patient data is predicted using an AI-enabled Hidden Markov Model (HMM). We analyzed the robustness and security of our scheme using BurrowsAbadiNeedham (BAN) logic. This analysis shows that the use of lightweight security primitives for the exchange of session keys makes the proposed scheme highly resilient in terms of security, efficiency, and robustness. Finally, the proposed scheme incurs nominal overhead in terms of processing, communication and storage and is capable to combat a wide range of adversarial threats.

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) ensures reliable and efficient data exchanges among the industrial processes using Artificial Intelligence (AI) within the cyber-physical systems. In the IIoT ecosystem, devices of industrial applications communicate with each other with little human intervention. They need to act intelligently to safeguard the data confidentiality and devices' authenticity. The ability to gather, process, and store real-time data depends on the quality of data, network connectivity, and processing capabilities of these devices. Pervasive Edge Computing (PEC) is gaining popularity nowadays due to the resource limitations imposed on the sensor-embedded IIoT devices. PEC processes the gathered data at the network edge to reduce the response time for these devices. However, PEC faces numerous research challenges in terms of secured communication, network connectivity, and resource utilization of the edge servers. To address these challenges, we propose a secured and intelligent communication scheme for PEC in an IIoT-enabled infrastructure. In the proposed scheme, forged identities of adversaries, i.e., Sybil devices, are detected by IIoT devices and shared with edge servers to prevent upstream transmission of their malicious data. Upon Sybil attack detection, each edge server executes a parallel Artificial Bee Colony (pABC) algorithm to perform optimal network configuration of IIoT devices. Each edge server performs the job migration to their neighboring servers for load balancing and better network performance, based on their processing and storage capabilities. The experimental results justify the efficiency of our proposed scheme in terms of Sybil attack detection, the convergence curves of our pABC algorithm, delay, throughput, and control overhead of data communication using PEC for IIoT.

Internet of Things (IoT) has gained significant importance due to its flexibility in integrating communication technologies and smart devices for the ease of service provisioning. IoT services rely on a heterogeneous cloud network for serving user demands ubiquitously. The service data management is a complex task in this heterogeneous environment due to random access and service compositions. In this article, a machine learning aided information management scheme is proposed for handling data to ensure uninterrupted user request service. The neural learning process gains control over service attributes and data response to abruptly assign resources to the incoming requests in the data plane. The learning process operates in the data plane, where requests and responses for service are instantaneous. This facilitates the smoothing of the learning process to decide upon the possible resources and more precise service delivery without duplication. The proposed data management scheme ensures less replication and minimum service response time irrespective of the request and device density.

The sheer volume of industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) malware is one of the most serious security threats in today's interconnected world, with new types of advanced persistent threats and advanced forms of obfuscations. This article presents a robust federated learning based architecture called Fed-IIoT for detecting Android malware applications in IIoT. Fed-IIoT consists of two parts: first, participant side, where the data are triggered by two dynamic poisoning attacks based on a generative adversarial network (GAN) and federated GAN; and second, server side, which aims to monitor the global model and shape a robust collaboration training model, by avoiding anomaly in aggregation by a GAN network (A3GAN) and adjust two GAN-based countermeasure algorithms. One of the main advantages of Fed-IIoT is that devices can safely participate in the IIoT and efficiently communicate with each other, with no privacy issues. We evaluate our solutions through experiments on various features using three IoT datasets. The results confirm the high accuracy rates of our attack and defense algorithms and show that the A3GAN defensive approach preserves the robustness of data privacy for Android mobile users and is about 8% higher accuracy with existing state-of-the-art solutions.

With an ever-accelerating trend of cybercrimes due to software vulnerabilities and exposures in Smart City industrial environment, effective and proactive vulnerability risk management becomes imperative. Statistical models learning rich historical vulnerability disclosure data undoubtedly provide critical risk insights. In this article, based on extreme value theory coupled with generalized additive models, we propose a novel framework to model extreme vulnerability disclosure events under both stationary and nonstationary scenarios. By utilizing this rigorous framework, we initiated an important study on quantifying extreme cyber risks. Through extensive empirical studies using real-life datasets, our proposed framework proves to effectively capture the dynamics of extreme events. Furthermore, it enables us to address quantitatively some of the key cyber risk management questions.

6G-enabled network in a box (NIB) is a multigenerational, rapidly deployable hardware, and software technology for the communication. 6G-enabled NIB provides high level of flexibility which makes it capable to provide connectivity services for different types of applications as it is effective for the communications of after disaster scenario, battlefields scenario, and industrial scenario. In 6G-enabled NIB deployed industrial applications, various passive and active attacks are possible because the involved entities communicate over insecure channel. In this article, a new remote user authentication and key management scheme is proposed for securing 6G-enabled NIB deployed for industrial applications, which we call in short as UAKMS-NIB. The security analysis shows the resilience of UAKMS-NIB against various types of possible attacks. The practical demonstration of UAKMS-NIB is also provided to measure its impact on the network performance parameters. Finally, a comparative analysis with other closely related existing schemes shows that UAKMS-NIB performs better than the existing schemes.

Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) platform serves as an interoperable medium for healthcare applications by connecting wearable sensors, end-users, and clinical diagnosis centers. This interoperable medium provides solutions for disease diagnosis; predicting and monitoring end-user health using physiological vital signs sensed wearable sensor data. The communicating and data exchanging internet of things (IoT) platform imposes latency and overloading uncertainties in the heterogeneous environment. This article introduces cognitive data processing for uncertainty analysis (CDP-UA) to improve WS data management's efficiency. CDP-UA addresses uncertainties in two levels namely aggregation and dissemination of WS data. The uncertainties in synchronizing aggregation and dissemination slot mapping are addressed using classification learning. In the dissemination process overloaded intervals are identified and segregated using regression learning and conditional sigmoid function analysis. The joint learning process helps to classify overloaded and latency-centric dissemination and aggregation instances to improve WS data delivery in the clinical/medical analysis center. The experimental analysis shows that the proposed method is reliable in achieving less uncertainty factor, latency, and overloaded intervals for varying disseminations and sensing intervals.

The rapid and convenient travel of people and the timely transportation of goods depend on the correct decision of the Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). Due to the decision-making of ITS requires a large amount of data to support, UAV-enabled periodic data collection is an effective method. However, due to the limited resources of UAV, UAV cannot directly collect data from all storage devices, resulting in unfair data collection. Therefore, we propose a UAV Speed Control based Fairness Data Collection (USCFDC) scheme. First, since the fairness of data collection will affect the decision-making of ITS, a framework for controlling the flight speed of the UAV is proposed to improve the fairness of data collection. The flight speed of UAV will slow down in areas with a large number of nodes, thereby improving the fairness of data collection. Second, a novel method is proposed to maximize the amount of data collected by UAV from each node. With this method, the value of the amount of data will be used as the dichotomous value in the dichotomy algorithm, and the UAV must collect a certain amount of data from each node. The upper and lower limits of the dichotomy algorithm are adjusted according to the time duration for UAV to collect data. Compared with previous schemes, the fairness of data collection can be improved by a maximum of 15.89% under the same flight time of UAV. Besides, the energy consumption is reduced by 49.31%-52.55% and the flight time of the UAV is reduced by 48%-62.38% when the amount of collected data is the same.

The security and privacy of healthcare enterprises (HEs) are crucial because they maintain sensitive information. Because of the unique functional requirement of omni-inclusiveness, HEs are expected to monitor patients, allowing for connectivity with vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). In the absence of literature on security provisioning frameworks that connect VANETs and HEs, this paper presents a smart zero-knowledge proof and statistical fingerprinting-based trusted secure communication framework for a fog computing environment. A zero-knowledge proof is used for vehicle authentication, and statistical fingerprinting is employed to secure communication between VANETs and HEs. Authenticity verification of the operations is performed at the on-board unit (OBU) fitted in the vehicle based on the service executions at the resident hardware platform. The processor clock cycles are acquired from the service executions in a complete sandboxed environment. The calculated cycles assist in developing the blueprint signature for the particular OBU of the vehicle. Hence, the fingerprint signature helps build trust and plays a key role in authenticating the vehicle's horizontal movement to everything or to different sections of the HEs. In an environment enabled for fog computing, our novel model can provide efficient remote monitoring.

Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) serves as the on-the wheel communication and service platform for the real-world driving users. Navigation service and traffic information flow among the connected vehicles relies on the available resources and infrastructure units. Appropriate sensing and selection of infrastructure units for seamless navigation responses and information flow in the dynamic environment is facilitated using bio-inspired learning in this article. This method named as ant-inspired recurrent learning model (ARLM) introduced in this article is focused to improve the sensing and response rate of the navigation-based services for the vehicles. This model relies on forward and backward ant agents and recurrent learning for maximizing the navigation service response rate of the vehicles. In this model, the training sets are differentiated on the basis of connection probability and learning depreciation to retain the service rate through different learning iterates. The conditional verification for sensing and retaining active link helps to reduce the sensing and response time irrespective of the varying vehicle and request densities. The performance of the proposed model is verified using suitable experimental analysis and the metrics information flow rate, service sensing, sensing time, response rate, and response time are analyzed for assessing ARLM.

Vehicular clouds (VCs) have become a promising research area due to its on-demand solutions, resource pooling, unified services, autonomous cloud formation and transformational management. It makes use of the underutilized resources of vehicles on the parking lot, roadways, driveways and streets, and creates the infrastructure to support various services offered by the cloud service provider (CSP) by deploying virtual machines (VMs). However, these vehicles can leave the coverage/grid of VC due to its mobility and change in the environment. Therefore, the hosted VMs on those vehicles can be transferred to other potential vehicles (i.e., migration) in order to avoid disruption of services. These services can be viewed as user requests (URs) submitted to the CSP by cloud users. Here, the challenging tasks are to map the URs to the VMs (or vehicles) and identify the potential vehicles for migration, and they need immediate attention. In this paper, we propose a smart cloud service management (SCSM) algorithm for VCs and address the above challenges. This algorithm consists of three phases, namely assignment of vehicles to grids, URs to grids and URs to vehicles by considering the mobility pattern of vehicles. The performance of SCSM is assessed using three traffic congestion scenarios and thirty-six instances of four datasets, and compared with round-robin (RR) and deficit weighted RR (DWRR) using seven performance metrics. The comparison results show that SCSM achieves 58% and 57% (33% and 33%) better than RR and DWRR in makespan (number of migrations) and other performance metrics.

With the rapid development of Internet of vehicles, connected vehicles, autonomous vehicles, and autonomous driving technologies, automotive Controller Area Networks (CAN) have suffered from numerous security threats. Deep learning models are the current mainstream intrusion detection techniques for threat analysis, and the state-of-the-art intrusion detection technique introduces the Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) model to generate usable attacked samples to supplement the training samples, but it exists the limitations of rough CAN message block construction and fails to detect the data tampering threat. Based on the CAN communication matrix defined by the automotive Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) for a vehicle model, we propose an enhanced deep learning GAN model with elaborate CAN message blocks and the enhanced GAN discriminator. The elaborate CAN message blocks in the training samples can precisely reflect the real generated CAN message blocks in the detection phase. The GAN discriminator can detect whether each message has suffered from the data tampering threat. Experimental results illustrate that the enhanced deep learning GAN model has higher detection accuracy, recall, and F1 scores than the state-of-the-art deep learning GAN model under various attacks and threats.

It is expected that a mixture of autonomous and manual vehicles will persist as a part of the intelligent transportation system (ITS) for many decades. Thus, addressing the safety issues arising from this mix of autonomous and manual vehicles before autonomous vehicles are entirely popularized is crucial. As the ITS system has increased in complexity, autonomous vehicles exhibit problems such as a low intention recognition rate and poor real-time performance when predicting the driving direction; these problems seriously affect the safety and comfort of mixed traffic systems. Therefore, the ability of autonomous vehicles to predict the driving direction in real time according to the surrounding traffic environment must be improved and researchers must work to create a more mature ITS. In this paper, we propose a deep learning-based traffic safety solution for a mixture of autonomous and manual vehicles in a 5G-enabled ITS. In this scheme, a driving trajectory dataset and a natural-driving dataset are employed as the network inputs to long-term memory networks in the 5G-enabled ITS: the probability matrix of each intention is calculated by the softmax function. Then, the final intention probability is obtained by fusing the mean rule in the decision layer. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme achieves intention recognition rates of 91.58% and 90.88% for left and right lane changes, respectively, effectively improving both accuracy and real-time intention recognition and improving the lane change problem in a mixed traffic environment.

E-commerce platforms incorporate reputation systems that allow customers to rate suppliers following financial transactions. Existing reputation systems cannot defend the centralized server against arbitrarily tampering with the supplier’s reputation. Furthermore, they do not offer reputation access across platforms. Rates are faced with privacy leakages because rating activities are correlated with privacy (e.g., identity and rating). Meanwhile, raters could be malicious and initiate multiple rating attacks and abnormal rating attacks. Determining how to address these issues have both research and practical value. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based privacy-preserving reputation system for e-commerce platforms named RepChain; our system allows cross-platform reputation access and anonymous and private ratings. Using RepChain, all e-commerce platforms collaborate and share users’ reputations by co-constructing a consortium blockchain and modeling the rating process as a finite state machine. In particular, we facilitate one-show anonymous credentials constructed from two-move blind signatures to protect customers’ identities and resist multiple rating attacks, leverage zero-knowledge range proof to verify the correctness of ratings and defend against abnormal rating attacks, design a secure sum computation protocol among nodes to update reputations, and verify ratings via batch processing and consensus hashes. Finally, we demonstrate the security and privacy of RepChain via a formal analysis and evaluate its performance based on Ethereum test network.

The advancements in the internet of things (IoT) require specialized security protocols to provide unbreakable security along with computation and communication efficiencies. Moreover, user privacy and anonymity has emerged as an integral part, along with other security requirements. Unfortunately, many recent authentication schemes to secure IoT-based systems were either proved as vulnerable to different attacks or prey of inefficiencies. Some of these schemes suffer from a faulty design that happened mainly owing to undue emphasis on privacy and anonymity alongside performance efficiency. This article aims to show the design faults by analyzing a very recent hash functions-based authentication scheme for cloud-based IoT systems with misunderstood privacy cum efficiency tradeoff owing to an unadorned design flaw, which is also present in many other such schemes. Precisely, it is proved in this article that the scheme of Wazid et al. cannot provide mutual authentication and key agreement between a user and a sensor node when there exists more than one registered user. We then proposed an improved scheme and proved its security through formal and informal methods. The proposed scheme completes the authentication cycle with a minor increase in computation cost but provides all security goals along with privacy.

Ride-hailing is a favored vehicular service model where drivers can deliver convenient rides to waiting riders via responding to a road-side unit or a ride-hailing service provider. However, previous works did not consider the order-linking function where a rider Cathy waving for a ride will be matched to a driver Bob in service with rider Alice whose destination is close to the start point of Cathy. Furthermore, a malicious matching executor could collude with an appointed driver to interfere with the matching process, which causes service unfairness and has not been addressed before. To mitigate these limitations, we first propose a privacy-preserving ride-hailing scheme OLink with the verifiable order-linking property. Specifically, we adopt road network partitioning and range query to achieve basic user matching. The user matching process supports range conditions and protects users' privacy. Next, a Proof-of-Linking protocol is designed based on the zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive argument of knowledge, zero-knowledge proof, and Bloom filters to enable the driver in service to generate three consecutive proofs for linking a current order to the next rider's order in advance; the proofs will be released such that anyone can verify the proofs and matching fairness is guaranteed. Finally, we formally prove the privacy and security of OLink, and then evaluate its performance with PySNARK to demonstrate feasibility and efficiency.

Recent advances in artificial intelligence, edge computing, and big data have enabled extensive reasoning capabilities at the edge of the network. Edge servers are now capable of extracting meaningful intelligence from IoT nodes, which can benefit a very diverse set of IoT applications, including smart carrier and distribution networks (power, people, water, and food), smart agriculture and manufacturing, and healthcare and maintenance. Unfortunately, as the infrastructures become more intelligent, they also become more vulnerable to disruption due to cyberattacks and information leakage. Furthermore, the rich data gathering and analytics involved in driving the intelligent management substantially raise the stakes in terms of privacy violation of the people and organizations that it serves.

As the integration of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) into visible light communications (VLCs) can offer many benefits for massive-connectivity applications and services in 5G and beyond, this article considers a UAV-assisted VLC using nonorthogonal multiple-access. More specifically, we formulate a joint problem of power allocation and UAV's placement to maximize the sum rate of all users, subject to constraints on power allocation, quality of service of users, and UAV's position. Since the problem is nonconvex and NP-hard in general, it is difficult to be solved optimally. Moreover, the problem is not easy to be solved by conventional approaches, e.g., coordinate descent algorithms, due to channel modeling in VLC. Therefore, we propose using the Harris hawks optimization (HHO) algorithm to solve the formulated problem and obtain an efficient solution. We then use the HHO algorithm together with artificial neural networks to propose a design that can be used in real-time applications and avoid falling into the “local minima” trap in conventional trainers. Numerical results are provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm and further demonstrate that the proposed algorithm/HHO trainer is superior to several alternative schemes and existing metaheuristic algorithms.

The complexity, sophistication, and impact of malware evolve with industrial revolution and technology advancements. This article discusses and proposes a robust cross-architecture IoT malware threat hunting model based on advanced ensemble learning (MTHAEL). Our unique MTHAEL model using stacked ensemble of heterogeneous feature selection algorithms and state-of-the-art neural networks to learn different levels of semantic features demonstrates enhanced IoT malware detection than existing approaches. MTHAEL is the first of its kind that effectively optimizes recurrent neural network (RNN) and convolutional neural network (CNN) with high classification accuracy and consistently low computational overheads on different IoT architectures. Cross-architecture benchmarking is performed during the training with different architectures such as ARM, Intel80386, MIPS, and MIPS+Intel80386 individually. Two different hardware architectures were employed to analyze the architecture overhead, namely Raspberry Pi 4 (ARM-based architecture) and Core-i5 (Intel-based architecture). Our proposed MTHAEL is evaluated comprehensively with a large IoT cross-architecture dataset of 21,137 samples and has achieved 99.98 percent classification accuracy for ARM architecture samples, surpassing prior related works. Overall, MTHAEL has demonstrated practical suitability for cross-architecture IoT malware detection with low computational overheads requiring only 0.32 seconds to detect Any IoT malware.

The integration between cloud computing and vehicular ad hoc networks, namely, vehicular clouds (VCs), has become a significant research area. This integration was proposed to accelerate the adoption of intelligent transportation systems. The trustworthiness in VCs is expected to carry more computing capabilities that manage large-scale collected data. This trend requires a security evaluation framework that ensures data privacy protection, integrity of information, and availability of resources. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that proposes a robust trustworthiness evaluation of vehicular cloud for security criteria evaluation and selection. This article proposes three-level security features in order to develop effectiveness and trustworthiness in VCs. To assess and evaluate these security features, our evaluation framework consists of three main interconnected components: 1) an aggregation of the security evaluation values of the security criteria for each level; 2) a fuzzy multicriteria decision-making algorithm; and 3) a simple additive weight associated with the importance-performance analysis and performance rate to visualize the framework findings. The evaluation results of the security criteria based on the average performance rate and global weight suggest that data residency, data privacy, and data ownership are the most pressing challenges in assessing data protection in a VC environment. Overall, this article paves the way for a secure VC using an evaluation of effective security features and underscores directions and challenges facing the VC community. This article sheds light on the importance of security by design, emphasizing multiple layers of security when implementing industrial VCs.

This article proposes a hybrid intelligent-classic control approach for reconstruction and compensation of cyber attacks launched on inputs of nonlinear cyber-physical systems (CPS) and industrial Internet of Things systems, which work through shared communication networks. In this article, a class of n-order nonlinear systems is considered as a model of CPS while it is in presence of cyber attacks only in the forward channel. An intelligent-classic control system is developed to compensate cyber-attacks. Neural network (NN) is designed as an intelligent estimator for attack estimation and a classic nonlinear control system based on the variable structure control method is designed to compensate the effect of attacks and control the system performance in tracking applications. In the proposed strategy, nonlinear control theory is applied to guarantee the stability of the system when attacks happen. In this strategy, a Gaussian radial basis function NN is used for online estimation and reconstruction of cyber-attacks launched on the networked system. An adaptation law of the intelligent estimator is derived from a Lyapunov function. Simulation results demonstrate the validity and feasibility of the proposed strategy in car cruise control application as the testbed.

The significant growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) takes a key and active role in healthcare, smart homes, smart manufacturing, and wearable gadgets. Due to complexness and difficulty in processing multimedia data, the IoT based scheme, namely Internet of Multimedia Things (IoMT) exists that is specialized for services and applications based on multimedia data. However, IoMT generated data are facing major processing and privacy issues. Therefore, tensor-based deep computation models proved a better platform to process IoMT generated data. A differentially private deep computation method working in the tensor space can attest to its efficacy for IoMT. Nevertheless, the deep computation model comprises a multitude of parameters; thus, it requires large units of memory and expensive computing units with higher performance levels, which hinders its performance for IoMT. Motivated by this, therefore, the paper proposes a deep private tensor train autoencoder (dPTTAE) technique to deal with IoMT generated data. Notably, the compression of weight tensors to manageable tensor train format is achieved through Tensor Train (TT) network. Moreover, TT format parameters are trained through higher-order back-propagation and gradient descent. We applied dPTTAE on three representative datasets. Comprehensive experimental evaluations and theoretical analysis show that dPTTAE enhances training time efficiency, and greatly improve memory utilization efficiency, attesting its potential for IoMT.

This paper intends to propose a trustworthy model for authenticating users and services over a Big Data Federation deployment architecture. The main goal of this model is to provide a Single-Sign-on (SSO) approach for the latest Hadoop 3.x platform. To achieve this, a conceptual model is proposed combining Hadoop access control primitives and the Apache Knox framework. The paper provides various insights regarding the latest ongoing developments and open challenges in this domain.

Complex Big Data systems in modern organisations are progressively becoming attack targets by existing and emerging threat agents. Elaborate and specialised attacks will increasingly be crafted to exploit vulnerabilities and weaknesses. With the ever-increasing trend of cybercrime and incidents due to these vulnerabilities, effective vulnerability management is imperative for modern organisations regardless of their size. However, organisations struggle to manage the sheer volume of vulnerabilities discovered on their networks. Moreover, vulnerability management tends to be more reactive in practice. Rigorous statistical models, simulating anticipated volume and dependence of vulnerability disclosures, will undoubtedly provide important insights to organisations and help them become more proactive in the management of cyber risks. By leveraging the rich yet complex historical vulnerability data, our proposed novel and rigorous framework has enabled this new capability. By utilising this sound framework, we initiated an important study on not only handling persistent volatilities in the data but also further unveiling multivariate dependence structure amongst different vulnerability risks. In sharp contrast to the existing studies on univariate time series, we consider the more general multivariate case striving to capture their intriguing relationships. Through our extensive empirical studies using the real world vulnerability data, we have shown that a composite model can effectively capture and preserve long-term dependency between different vulnerability and exploit disclosures. In addition, the paper paves the way for further study on the stochastic perspective of vulnerability proliferation towards building more accurate measures for better cyber risk management as a whole.

With the explosion of Internet of Things (IoT) worldwide, there is an increasing threat from malicious software (malware) attackers that calls for efficient monitoring of vulnerable systems. Large amounts of data collected from computer networks, servers, and mobile devices need to be analysed for malware proliferation. Effective analysis methods are needed to match with the scale and complexity of such a data-intensive environment. In today’s Big Data contexts, visualisation techniques can support malware analysts going through the time-consuming process of analysing suspicious activities thoroughly. This paper takes a step further in contributing to the evolving realm of visualisation techniques used in the information security field. The aim of the paper is twofold: (1) to provide a comprehensive overview of the existing visualisation techniques for detecting suspicious behaviour of systems and (2) to design a novel visualisation using similarity matrix method for establishing malware classification accurately. The prime motivation of our proposal is to identify obfuscated malware using visualisation of the extended x86 IA-32 (opcode) similarity patterns, which are hard to detect with the existing approaches. Our approach uses hybrid models wherein static and dynamic malware analysis techniques are combined effectively along with visualisation of similarity matrices in order to detect and classify zero-day malware efficiently. Overall, the high accuracy of classification achieved with our proposed method can be visually observed since different malware families exhibit significantly dissimilar behaviour patterns.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to mitigate vulnerabilities in web applications, security detection and prevention are the most important mechanisms for security. However, most existing research focuses on how to prevent an attack at the web application layer, with less work dedicated to setting up a response action if a possible attack happened. Design/methodology/approach – A combination of a Signature-based Intrusion Detection System (SIDS) and an Anomaly-based Intrusion Detection System (AIDS), namely, the Intelligent Intrusion Detection and Prevention System (IIDPS). Findings – After evaluating the new system, a better result was generated in line with detection efficiency and the false alarm rate. This demonstrates the value of direct response action in an intrusion detection system. Research limitations/implications – Data limitation. Originality/value – The contributions of this paper are to first address the problem of web application vulnerabilities. Second, to propose a combination of an SIDS and an AIDS, namely, the IIDPS. Third, this paper presents a novel approach by connecting the IIDPS with a response action using fuzzy logic. Fourth, use the risk assessment to determine an appropriate response action against each attack event. Combining the system provides a better performance for the Intrusion Detection System, and makes the detection and prevention more effective.