The Internet has opened the floor to stakeholders by redefining the way of organizing, communicating, and collaborating that was initiated by the Web’s development. The advancement of the World Wide Web is an outright phenomenon and significant and we witnessed the evolution of the Web. As decentralized technologies continue to gain traction, Web3, or the decentralized internet, has emerged as a promising approach to enable a more secure, transparent, and privacy-preserved digital landscape. In this paper, we thoroughly conduct a systematic study to explore the challenges and opportunities encountered by blockchain developers in the context of decentralized applications (dApps) in Web3. We analyze a set of peer-reviewed research articles, whitepapers, and technical reports and present an in-depth understanding of the current state of Web3 development and its implications. Our finding indicates the opportunities that Web3 can facilitate, such as expanded use cases, enhanced security and privacy, decentralized infrastructure, and the potential for enabling inclusive development resources for blockchain developers. Additionally, we highlight various challenges that blockchain developers deal with including scalability, security, privacy, interoperability, and the need for standardized tools and frameworks along with various challenges in the software development lifecycle (SDLC). While there are significant challenges to overcome, the potential benefits of Web3 are substantial and could lead to a more inclusive, secure, and transparent digital ecosystem. Furthermore, we emphasize the importance of continued research, collaboration, and innovation among stakeholders to address the identified challenges and capitalize on Web3’s opportunities.

Managing and exchanging sensitive information securely is a paramount concern for different domains such as scientific, finance, cybersecurity, and healthcare. The increasing reliance on computing workflows and digital data transactions requires ensuring that sensitive information is protected from unauthorized access, tampering, or misuse and ensuring data integrity and transparency. To address this need, several approaches have been proposed such as JWT, SciTokens, Verifiable Credentials, and Smart Contracts which provide different methods for managing and exchanging information securely in centralized or decentralized and trustworthy environments. However, each technology offers unique advantages and limitations that require a comprehensive analysis to understand its potential and challenges. In our previous study, we conducted a comprehensive analysis of these approaches for authenticating and securing access to scientific data. This research further proposes a novel blockchain-based verifiable credentials that integrate the concept of Smart Contracts. The aim of this study is to introduce a decentralized and privacy-preserving authentication mechanism to enable stakeholders to share, verify, or revocation of their data with enhanced security, transparency, and trust. The proposed framework utilizes two different blockchain frameworks, Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum to conduct comprehensive research to evaluate the effectiveness of both frameworks for the development of verifiable credentials. Our analysis indicates that Hyperledger Fabric offers enhanced security and ensures robust integrity through a private network and chaincode mechanism for authentication and access to data. As a result of our analysis, we adopt Hyperledger Fabric for the implementation and demonstration of the final version of our framework. We evaluate the proposed approach with a set of educational data to measure the effectiveness of the system. We find the proposed framework enables users to share data effectively within a secure network and only authorized stakeholders are allowed to access the shared data.

The software supply chain (SSC) attack has become one of the crucial issues that are being increased rapidly with the advancement of the software development domain. In general, SSC attacks execute during the software development processes lead to vulnerabilities in software products targeting downstream customers and even involved stakeholders. Machine Learning approaches are proven in detecting and preventing software security vulnerabilities. Besides, emerging quantum machine learning can be promising in addressing SSC attacks. Considering the distinction between traditional and quantum machine learning, performance could be varies based on the proportions of the experimenting dataset. In this paper, we conduct a comparative analysis between quantum neural networks (QNN) and conventional neural networks (NN) with a software supply chain attack dataset known as ClaMP. Our goal is to distinguish the performance between QNN and NN and to conduct the experiment, we develop two different models for QNN and NN by utilizing Pennylane for quantum and TensorFlow and Keras for traditional respectively. We evaluated the performance of both models with different proportions of the ClaMP dataset to identify the f1 score, recall, precision, and accuracy. We also measure the execution time to check the efficiency of both models. The demonstration result indicates that execution time for QNN is slower than NN with a higher percentage of datasets. Due to recent advancements in QNN, a large level of experiments shall be carried out to understand both models accurately in our future research.

The primary goal of the authentic learning approach is to engage and motivate students in a learning environment that encourages all students in learning. This approach provides students with hands-on experiences in solving real-world security problems. We designed and developed ten learning modules based on 10 cybersecurity cases with different ML solutions. Each learning module consists of pre-lab, lab, and post-lab (Pre/Lab/Post) activities. All portable labs are made available on Google CoLab for ML to cybersecurity so that students can access and practice these hands-on labs anywhere and anytime without time tedious installation and configuration which will engage students in learning concepts and getting more experience for hands-on problem-solving skills. In this paper, we adopt Neural Network Algorithms for Network Denial of Service (DOS) Detection where we apply the KDDCup 1999 datasets contain a standard set of data to be audited, which includes a wide variety of intrusions simulated in a military network environment. Our primary goal of this lab is to show whether a link is a malicious or safe connection. Our demonstration shows an achieved accuracy of 99.89%.

Bridges play a vital part in the transportation system by ensuring the connectedness of transportation systems, which is critical for a country’s social and economic prosperity by offering daily mobility to the people. However, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE 2017), many U.S. bridges are in critical condition, raising safety issues, with 9.1 and 13.6 percent of the country’s 614,387 bridges, respectively, structurally defective, and functionally obsolete. Every day, 178 million people traverse these structurally defective bridges. Furthermore, the average annual failure rate is expected to be between 87 and 222. Bridge breakdowns have disastrous repercussions, and in many cases, result in death. While bridge authorities strive to improve bridge conditions, budget limits make it difficult to make cost-effective maintenance decisions. Bridge authorities distribute limited repair resources based on projected future bridge conditions. As a result, building a data-driven, autonomous, and effective bridge condition prediction model is critical for improving maintenance decision-making. In this paper, we present a novel bridge condition prediction framework using advanced Machine Learning (ML) algorithms on the National Bridge Inventory (NBI) dataset. The framework consists of two stages, where the most informative features from the NBI dataset are selected using the Recursive Feature Elimination process and in the 2ndstep, ML classifiers are applied to the selected features for bridge condition prediction. The experimental results show that the proposed framework can effectively predict bridge conditions by producing highly accurate results in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, and f1-score.

With the rapid technological advancement, security has become a major issue due to the increase in malware activity that poses a serious threat to the security and safety of both computer systems and stakeholders. To maintain stakeholder’s, particularly, end user’s security, protecting the data from fraudulent efforts is one of the most pressing concerns. A set of malicious programming code, scripts, active content, or intrusive software that is designed to destroy intended computer systems and programs or mobile and web applications is referred to as malware. According to a study, naive users are unable to distinguish between malicious and benign applications. Thus, computer systems and mobile applications should be designed to detect malicious activities towards protecting the stakeholders. A number of algorithms are available to detect malware activities by utilizing novel concepts including Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning. In this study, we emphasize Artificial Intelligence (AI) based techniques for detecting and preventing malware activity. We present a detailed review of current malware detection technologies, their shortcomings, and ways to improve efficiency. Our study shows that adopting futuristic approaches for the development of malware detection applications shall provide significant advantages. The comprehension of this synthesis shall help researchers for further research on malware detection and prevention using AI.

Traditional network intrusion detection approaches encounter feasibility and sustainability issues to combat modern, sophisticated, and unpredictable security attacks. Deep neural networks (DNN) have been successfully applied for intrusion detection problems. The optimal use of DNN-based classifiers requires careful tuning of the hyper-parameters. Manually tuning the hyperparameters is tedious, time-consuming, and computationally expensive. Hence, there is a need for an automatic technique to find optimal hyperparameters for the best use of DNN in intrusion detection. This paper proposes a novel Bayesian optimization-based framework for the automatic optimization of hyperparameters, ensuring the best DNN architecture. We evaluated the performance of the proposed framework on NSL-KDD, a benchmark dataset for network intrusion detection. The experimental results show the framework’s effectiveness as the resultant DNN architecture demonstrates significantly higher intrusion detection performance than the random search optimization-based approach in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, and f1-score.

Ride-hailing and ride-sharing applications have recently gained popularity as a convenient alternative to traditional modes of travel. Current research into autonomous vehicles is accelerating rapidly and will soon become a critical component of a ride-hailing platform’s architecture. Implementing an autonomous vehicle ride-hailing platform proves a difficult challenge due to the centralized nature of traditional ride-hailing architectures. In a traditional ride-hailing environment the drivers operate their own personal vehicles so it follows that a fleet of autonomous vehicles would be required for a centralized ride-hailing platform to succeed. Decentralization of the ride-hailing platform would remove a roadblock along the way to an autonomous vehicle ride-hailing platform by allowing owners of autonomous vehicles to add their vehicle to a community-driven fleet when not in use. Blockchain technology is an attractive choice for this decentralized architecture due to its immutability and fault tolerance. This thesis proposes a framework for developing a decentralized ride-hailing architecture that is verifiably secure. This framework is implemented on the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain platform. The evaluation of the implementation is done by applying known security models, utilizing a static analysis tool, and performing a performance analysis under heavy network load.