ABSTRACT Traditional loan approval processes are manual, time‐consuming and susceptible to human bias. This research develops a machine learning‐based system to automate loan eligibility assessment while enhancing efficiency, accuracy and fairness in credit decision‐making. We developed and compared multiple supervised ML models—including Random Forest, XGBoost, stacking and voting ensembles—on a publicly available loan dataset (614 instances, 13 features). To address class imbalance (68.7% approved, 31.3% rejected), we applied the Synthetic Minority Over‐sampling Technique (SMOTE). Hyperparameter tuning was performed using GridSearchCV with 5‐fold cross‐validation, optimising for F1‐score. Model performance was evaluated using accuracy, precision, recall, F1‐score and Area Under the Curve (AUC). Both Local Interpretable Model‐Agnostic Explanations (LIME) and SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) were applied to ensure transparency. A tuned Random Forest classifier achieved the best performance with an accuracy of 85.96%, F1‐score of 87.17% and recall of 95.32%, outperforming XGBoost and ensemble methods. Cross‐dataset validation on the Statlog German Credit dataset (1000 instances, 20 features) confirmed the framework's generalisability, with comparable AUC values (0.90 vs. 0.91). Overfitting analysis confirms moderate generalisation gaps, and a gender‐based fairness evaluation shows all models exceed the 0.80 disparate impact threshold. This study demonstrates that a systematic framework combining rigorous hyperparameter tuning, class imbalance handling and explainable AI can create accurate, transparent and equitable loan approval systems, providing a practical blueprint for responsible AI deployment in credit decision‐making.

The advent of 6G technology has paved the way for unprecedented advancements in the Internet of Things (IoT), ushering in an era of hyper-connectivity and ubiquitous communication. However, with the proliferation of interconnected devices in 6G-enabled IoT ecosystems, the risk of malicious intrusions and new cyber threats becomes more prominent. Furthermore, the incorporation of AI into 6G networks introduces additional security concerns, such as the risk of adversarial attacks on AI models and the potential misuse of AI for cyber threats. Consequently, securing the extensive and diverse array of connected devices poses a substantial challenge in the 6G environment and needs reconsideration of prior security traditional methods. This paper aims to address these challenges by proposing a novel collaborative intrusion detection system (CIDS) that relies on AI and blockchain technologies. The collaborative nature of the proposed CIDS fosters a collective defense approach, where nodes within the IoT network actively share threat intelligence, enabling rapid response and mitigation. The effectiveness of the proposed system is evaluated through comprehensive simulations and proof-of-concept experiments. The results demonstrate the system’s ability to effectively detect and mitigate falsified and zero-day attacks, thereby fortifying the security infrastructure of 6G -enabled IoT environments.

World Health Organization (WHO) has identified depression as a significant contributor to global disability, creating a complex thread in both public and private health. Electroencephalogram (EEG) can accurately reveal the working condition of the human brain, and it is considered an effective tool for analyzing depression. However, manual depression detection using EEG signals is time-consuming and tedious. To address this, fully automatic depression identification models have been designed using EEG signals to assist clinicians. In this study, we propose a novel automated deep learning-based depression detection system using EEG signals. The required EEG signals are gathered from publicly available databases, and three sets of features are extracted from the original EEG signal. Firstly, spectrogram images are generated from the original EEG signal, and 3-dimensional Convolutional Neural Networks (3D-CNN) are employed to extract deep features. Secondly, 1D-CNN is utilized to extract deep features from the collected EEG signal. Thirdly, spectral features are extracted from the collected EEG signal. Following feature extraction, optimal weights are fused with the three sets of features. The selection of optimal features is carried out using the developed Chaotic Owl Invasive Weed Search Optimization (COIWSO) algorithm. Subsequently, the fused features undergo analysis using the Self-Attention-based Gated Densenet (SA-GDensenet) for depression detection. The parameters within the detection network are optimized with the assistance of the same COIWSO. Finally, implementation results are analyzed in comparison to existing detection models. The experimentation findings of the developed model show 96% of accuracy. Throughout the empirical result, the findings of the developed model show better performance than traditional approaches.

The electrical grid has significantly evolved over the years, thus creating a smart paradigm, which is well known as the smart electrical grid. However, this evolution creates critical cybersecurity risks due to the vulnerable nature of the industrial systems and the involvement of new technologies. Therefore, in this paper, the ELECTRON architecture is presented as an integrated platform to detect, mitigate and prevent potential cyberthreats timely. ELECTRON combines both cybersecurity and energy defence mechanisms in a collaborative way. The key aspects of ELECTRON are (a) dynamic risk assessment, (b) asset certification, (c) federated intrusion detection and correlation, (d) Software Defined Networking (SDN) mitigation, (e) proactive islanding and (f) cybersecurity training and certification.

The arrival of autonomous vehicles (AVs) promises many great benefits, including increased safety and reduced energy consumption, pollution, and congestion. However, these engines have many security and privacy issues that could undermine the expected benefits if not addressed. AVs will provide new opportunities for hackers to carry out malicious attacks, posing a great threat to the future of mobility and data protection. The research trend in this field indicates that combining Blockchain and AI could bring strong protection for AVs against malicious attacks. Blockchain and AI have different working paradigms, but when merged, they can empower each other, and solve many security and privacy issues of AVs. AI can optimise the construction of the Blockchain to make it more efficient, secure and energy-saving, where Blockchain provides data immutability and trust mechanism for AI-based solutions and makes them more transparent, trustful, and explainable. Although some research is being conducted on this area, the topic of applying Blockchain and AI for securing AVs is not deeply investigated. In this paper, we explore the possible application of an amalgamation of Blockchain and AI solutions for securing AVs. We first introduce a classification of security and privacy threats that may arise from the application of AVs. Then, we provide an overview of recent literature regarding Blockchain and AI usage for securing AVs. Finally, we highlight limitations and challenges that may face the integration of Blockchain and AI with AVs based on our systemic review and suggest potential future directions for research in this field.

The rapid increase in the use of IoT devices brings many benefits to the digital society, ranging from improved efficiency to higher productivity. However, the limited resources and the open nature of these devices make them vulnerable to various cyber threats. A single compromised device can have an impact on the whole network and lead to major security and physical damages. This paper explores the potential of using network profiling and machine learning to secure IoT against cyber attacks. The proposed anomaly-based intrusion detection solution dynamically and actively profiles and monitors all networked devices for the detection of IoT device tampering attempts as well as suspicious network transactions. Any deviation from the defined profile is considered to be an attack and is subject to further analysis. Raw traffic is also passed on to the machine learning classifier for examination and identification of potential attacks. Performance assessment of the proposed methodology is conducted on the Cyber-Trust testbed using normal and malicious network traffic. The experimental results show that the proposed anomaly detection system delivers promising results with an overall accuracy of 98.35% and 0.98% of false-positive alarms.

With the increase of IoT devices and technologies coming into service, Malware has risen as a challenging threat with increased infection rates and levels of sophistication. Without strong security mechanisms, a huge amount of sensitive data are exposed to vulnerabilities, and therefore, easily abused by cybercriminals to perform several illegal activities. Thus, advanced network security mechanisms that are able of performing a real-time traffic analysis and mitigation of malicious traffic are required. To address this challenge, we are proposing a novel IoT malware traffic analysis approach using deep learning and visual representation for faster detection and classification of new malware (zero-day malware). The detection of malicious network traffic in the proposed approach works at the package level, reducing significantly the time of detection with promising results due to the deep learning technologies used. To evaluate our proposed method performance, a dataset is constructed which consists of 1000 pcap files of normal and malware traffic that are collected from different network traffic sources. The experimental results of Residual Neural Network (ResNet50) are very promising, providing a 94.50% accuracy rate for detection of malware traffic.

The blockchain has found numerous applications in many areas with the expectation to significantly enhance their security. The Internet of things (IoT) constitutes a prominent application domain of blockchain, with a number of architectures having been proposed for improving not only security but also properties like transparency and auditability. However, many blockchain solutions suffer from inherent constraints associated with the consensus protocol used. These constraints are mostly inherited by the permissionless setting, e.g. computational power in proof-of-work, and become serious obstacles in a resource-constrained IoT environment. Moreover, consensus protocols with low throughput or high latency are not suitable for IoT networks where massive volumes of data are generated. Thus, in this paper we focus on permissioned blockchain platforms and investigate the consensus protocols used, aiming at evaluating their performance and fault tolerance as the main selection criteria for (in principle highly insecure) IoT ecosystem. The results of the paper provide new insights on the essential differences of various consensus protocols and their capacity to meet IoT needs.

Insider threats are one of the most damaging risk factors for the IT systems and infrastructure of a company or an organization; identification of insider threats has prompted the interest of the world academic research community, with several solutions having been proposed to alleviate their potential impact. For the implementation of the experimental stage described in this study, the Convolutional Neural Network (from now on CNN) algorithm was used and implemented via the Google Tensorflow program, which was trained to identify potential threats from images produced by the available dataset. From the examination of the images that were produced and with the help of Machine Learning, the question whether the activity of each user is classified as “malicious” or not for the Information System was answered.

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Protecting and preventing sensitive data from being used inappropriately has become a challenging task. Even a small mistake in securing data can be exploited by phishing attacks to release private information such as passwords or financial information to a malicious actor. Phishing has now proven so successful, it is the number one attack vector. Many approaches have been proposed to protect against this type of cyber-attack, from additional staff training, enriched spam filters to large collaborative databases of known threats such as PhishTank and OpenPhish. However, they mostly rely upon a user falling victim to an attack and manually adding this new threat to the shared pool, which presents a constant disadvantage in the fight back against phishing. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to protect against phishing attacks using binary visualisation and machine learning. Unlike previous work in this field, our approach uses an automated detection process and requires no further user interaction, which allows faster and more accurate detection process. The experiment results show that our approach has high detection rate.

In the last few years, a countless number of permissioned blockchain solutions have been proposed, with each one to claim that it revolutionizes the way of the transaction processing along with the security and privacy preserving mechanisms that it provides. Hyperledger Fabric is one of the most popular permissioned blockchain architectures that has made a significant impact on the market. However, there are only few papers of finding architectural risks regarding the security and the privacy preserving mechanisms of Hyperledger Fabric. This paper separates the attack surface of the blockchain platform into four components, namely, consensus, chaincode, network and privacy preserving mechanisms, in all of which an attacker (from inside or outside the network) can exploit the platform's design and gain access to or misuse the network. In addition, we highlight the appropriate counter-measures that can be taken in each component to address the corresponding risks and provide a significantly secure and enhanced privacy preserving Fabric network. We hope that by bringing this paper into light, we can aid developers to avoid security flaws and implementations that can be exploited by attackers but also to motivate further research to harden the platform's security and the client's privacy.

Management of network performance comprises numerous functions such as measuring, modelling, planning and optimising networks to ensure that they transmit traffic with the speed, capacity and reliability expected by the applications, each with different requirements for bandwidth and delay. Overall, the objective of this paper is to propose a novel mechanism to optimise the network resource allocation through supporting the routing of individual flows, by clustering them based on performance and integrating the respective clusters with an SDN scheme. In this paper we have employed a particular set of traffic features then applied data reduction and unsupervised machine learning techniques, to derive an Internet traffic performance-based clustering model. Finally, the resulting data clusters are integrated within a unified SDN architectural solution, which improves network management by finding nearly optimal flow routing, to be evaluated against a number of traffic data sources.

The technological evolution brought by the Internet of things (IoT) comes with new forms of cyber-attacks exploiting the complexity and heterogeneity of IoT networks, as well as, the existence of many vulnerabilities in IoT devices. The detection of compromised devices, as well as the collection and preservation of evidence regarding alleged malicious behavior in IoT networks, emerge as areas of high priority. This paper presents a blockchain-based solution, which is designed for the smart home domain, dealing with the collection and preservation of digital forensic evidence. The system utilizes a private forensic evidence database, where the captured evidence is stored, along with a permissioned blockchain that allows providing security services like integrity, authentication, and non-repudiation, so that the evidence can be used in a court of law. The blockchain stores evidences' metadata, which are critical for providing the aforementioned services, and interacts via smart contracts with the different entities involved in an investigation process, including Internet service providers, law enforcement agencies and prosecutors. A high-level architecture of the blockchain-based solution is presented that allows tackling the unique challenges posed by the need for digitally handling forensic evidence collected from IoT networks.

The present paper deals with the elucidation and implementation of the Data Protection by Design (DPbD) principle as recently introduced in the European Union data protection law, specifically with regards to cybersecurity systems in a Smart Home environment, both from a legal and a technical perspective. Starting point constitutes the research conducted in the Cyber-Trust project, which endeavours the development of an innovative and customisable cybersecurity platform for cyber-threat intelligence gathering, detection and mitigation within the Internet of Things ecosystem. During the course of the paper, the requirements of DPbD with regards to the conceptualisation, design and actual development of the system are introduced as prescribed in law. These requirements are then translated into technical solutions, as envisaged in the Cyber-Trust system. For trade-offs are not foreign to the DPbD context, technical limitations and legal challenges are also discussed in this interdisciplinary dialogue.

This paper considers the use of novel technologies for mitigating attacks that aim at compromising intrusion detection systems (IDSs). Solutions based on collaborative intrusion detection networks (CIDNs) could increase the resilience against such attacks as they allow IDS nodes to gain knowledge from each other by sharing information. However, despite the vast research in this area, trust management issues still pose significant challenges and recent works investigate whether these could be addressed by relying on blockchain and related distributed ledger technologies. Towards that direction, the paper proposes the use of a trust-based blockchain in CIDNs, referred to as trust-chain, to protect the integrity of the information shared among the CIDN peers, enhance their accountability, and secure their collaboration by thwarting insider attacks. A consensus protocol is proposed for CIDNs, which is a combination of a proof-of-stake and proof-of-work protocols, to enable collaborative IDS nodes to maintain a reliable and tampered-resistant trust-chain.

Autonomous vehicles have huge potential in improving road safety and congestion. Towards the road map of full autonomy, each vehicle will be able to communicate with other vehicles within the network of vehicles to improve congestion and notify emergencies. Many architectures for communication between vehicles are centralised, typically using cloud servers. The security and trust of that communication is paramount. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to propose a novel method for encrypting and fragmenting data in various cloud providers in order to protect the anonymity and increase the uncertainty for an attacker having access to the data on cloud. Our experimental results seem promising and we were able to achieve good results with low overhead in transmission.

Load balancing and IP anycast are traffic routing algorithms used to speed up delivery of the Domain Name System. In case of a DDoS attack or an overload condition, the value of these protocols is critical, as they can provide intrinsic DDoS mitigation with the failover alternatives. In this paper, we present a methodology for predicting the next DNS response in the light of a potential redirection to less busy servers, in order to mitigate the size of the attack. Our experiments were conducted using data from the Nov. 2015 attack of the Root DNS servers and Logistic Regression, k-Nearest Neighbors, Support Vector Machines and Random Forest as our primary classifiers. The models were able to successfully predict up to 83% of responses for Root Letters that operated on a small number of sites and consequently suffered the most during the attacks. On the other hand, regarding DNS requests coming from more distributed Root servers, the models demonstrated lower accuracy. Our analysis showed a correlation between the True Positive Rate metric and the number of sites, as well as a clear need for intelligent management of traffic in load balancing practices.

Internet of Things (IoT) is a whole new ecosystem comprised of heterogeneous connected devices -i.e. computers, laptops, smart-phones and tablets as well as embedded devices and sensors-that communicate to deliver capabilities making our living, cities, transport, energy, and many other areas more intelligent. The main concerns raised from the IoT ecosystem are the devices poor support for patching/updating and the poor on-board computational power. A number of issues stem from this: inherent vulnerabilities and the inability to detect and defend against external attacks. Also, due to the nature of their operation, the devices tend to be rather open to communication, which makes attacks easy to spread once reaching a network. The aim of this research is to investigate if it is possible to extract useful results regarding attacks' trends and be able to predict them, before it is too late, by crawling Deep/Dark and Surface web. The results of this work show that is possible to find the trend and be able to act proactively in order to protect the IoT ecosystem.

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks represent a significant threat for companies, affecting them on a regular basis, as reported in the 2013 Information Security Breaches Survey (Technical Report. http://www.pwc.co.uk/assets/pdf/cyber-security-2013-technical-report.pdf.). The most common target is web services, the downtime of which could lead to significant monetary costs and loss of reputation. IP spoofing is often used in DDoS attacks not only to protect the identity of offending bots but also to overcome IP-based filtering controls. This paper aims to propose a new multi-layer IP Spoofing detection mechanism, called fuzzy hybrid spoofing detector (FHSD), which is based on source MAC address, hop count, GeoIP, OS passive fingerprinting and web browser user agent. The hop count algorithm has been optimized to limit the need for continuous traceroute requests, by querying the subnet IP Address and GeoIP information instead of individual IP addresses. FHSD uses fuzzy empirical rules and fuzzy largest of maximum operator to identify offensive IPs and mitigate offending traffic. The proposed system was developed and tested against the BoNeSi DDoS emulator with encouraging results in terms of detection and performance. Specifically, FHSD analysed 10 000 packets, and correctly identified 99.99% of spoofed traffic in <5 s. It also reduced the need for traceroute requests by 97%.