The explosive development of the metaverse as a socio-technical system is a major challenge to national security and governance. The current paper analyses the existing academic and industry literature in order to determine the key risks and its implications. We find that the metaverse is bringing in novel vectors of misinformation and disinformation, radicalisation, financial crime, terrorism, and state-sponsored hybrid warfare, whereas among the most specific dangers are the recruitment of extremists in the virtual realm of immersion, laundering of illicit funds through decentralised economies, identity theft, and critical infrastructure exploitation. The majority of the existing mitigation measures suggested include cybersecurity tools, identity verification, content moderation, and regulatory measures but according to our analysis, coordinated governance, interdisciplinary research, and adaptable policy frameworks are required. The paper offers an in-depth insight into ways of reducing metaverse-associated threats to national security through the combination of technical, social, and policy approaches.

The Software-Defined Networking (SDN) powered Internet of Things (IoT) offers a global perspective of the network and facilitates control and access of IoT devices using a centralized high-level network approach called Software Defined-IoT (SD-IoT). However, this integration and high flow of data generated by IoT devices raises serious security issues in the centralized control intelligence of SD-IoT. Motivated by the aforementioned challenges, we present a new Deep-Learning empowered Threat Hunting Framework named DLTHF to protect SD-IoT data and detect (binary and multi-vector) attack vectors. First, an automated unsupervised feature extraction module is designed that combines data perturbation-driven encoding and normalization-driven scaling with the proposed Long Short-Term Memory Contractive Sparse AutoEncoder (LSTMCSAE) method to filter and transform dataset values into the protected format. Second, using the encoded data, a novel Threat Detection System (TDS) using Multi-head Self-attention-based Bidirectional Recurrent Neural Networks (MhSaBiGRNN) is designed to detect cyber threats and their types. In particular, a unique TDS strategy is developed in which each time instances is analyzed and allocated a self-learned weight based on the degree of relevance. Further, we also design a deployment architecture for DLTHF in the SD-IoT network. The framework is rigorously evaluated on two new SD-IoT data sources to show its effectiveness.

The vehicle road cooperation system is designed to enable intelligent and collaborative communication between vehicles and vehicles, infrastructure, and pedestrians to reduce road accidents and improve road efficiency. As a critical component of this, vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication is expected to achieve efficient information interaction between vehicles and support services, such as collision warning and operation assistance. However, due to the high mobility of vehicles and channel fading, V2V communication suffers from link instability, high latency, and low-resource utilization. To address these issues, this article proposes a high-reliability low-latency intelligent geographic routing (HRLLIGR) protocol based on the greedy perimeter stateless routing (GPSR) protocol to improve its performance in such highly dynamic networks. The main mechanisms of HRLLIGR include a reliable greedy forwarding algorithm based on the evaluation of link stability metrics, a low-latency area prediction forwarding algorithm for routing voids, and an intelligent routing update mechanism to reduce routing overhead. Simulation results suggest that the HRLLIGR protocol outperforms traditional routing protocols, such as ad-hoc on-demand distance vector (AODV), optimized link state routing (OLSR), and GPSR regarding reliability, latency, and overhead. Specifically, compared to the GPSR protocol, it achieves 13.7% improvement in packet delivery rate, 21.3% reduction in average end-to-end latency, and 15.1% decrease in routing overhead.

In intelligent transportation systems (ITSs), computer vision and digital twin (DT) technologies are crucial for enhancing safety and efficiency. High-speed vehicles require timely alert systems to prevent collisions with other vehicles and infrastructure, as even a single misjudgment can lead to severe road accident. Advanced driver-assistance systems (ADASs) and vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) enable vehicle-to-vehicle cooperation, facilitating the exchange of critical alerts. By deploying time-sensitive processing techniques at the edge and utilizing DTs for comprehensive analysis, vehicles can take preemptive actions to avoid accidents. Road potholes contribute to traffic disruptions, the accordion effect, and vehicle damage, making their detection essential. This work explores advanced computer vision techniques implemented at the edge, specifically on vehicles. Roadside units (RSUs) offload DT data, and edge detection results are updated on the DT, providing a control center with accurate road condition information and maintaining a precise virtual replica of the environment. This distributed edge intelligence (DEI) enables rapid decision making with reduced latency while offering a comprehensive view of vehicle lifecycle management through DT data. The proposed algorithm, tested in real time, achieves mean average precision of 85% using YOLOv9t with minimal latency of 3 ms, ensuring effective pothole detection and seamless communication among nearby vehicles.

Sentiment propagation plays a crucial role in the continuous emergence of social public opinion and network group events. By analyzing the maximum Influence of sentiment propagation, we can gain a better understanding of how network group events arise and evolve. Influence maximization (IM) is a critical fundamental issue in the field of informatics, whose purpose is to identify the collection of individuals and maximize the specific information's influence in real-world social networks, and the sentiments expressed by nodes with the greatest influence can significantly impact the emotions of the entire group. The IM issue has been established to be an NP-hard (nondeterministic polynomial) challenge. Although some methods based on the greedy framework can achieve ideal results, they bring unacceptable computational overhead, while the performance of other methods is unsatisfactory. In this article, we explicate the IM problem and design a local influence evaluation function as the objective function of the IM to estimate the influence spread in the cascade diffusion models. We redefine particle parameters, update rules for IM problems, and introduce learning automata to realize multiple search modes. Then, we propose a multisearch particle Swarm optimization algorithm (MSPSO) to optimize the objective function. This algorithm incorporates a heuristic-based initialization strategy and a local search scheme to expedite MSPSO convergence. Experimental results on five real-world social network datasets consistently demonstrate MSPSO's superior efficiency and performance compared with baseline algorithms.

The Artificial Intelligence-enabled Internet of Medical Things (AI-IoMT) envisions the connectivity of medical devices encompassing advanced computing technologies to empower large-scale intelligent healthcare networks. The AI-IoMT continuously monitors patients' health and vital computations via IoMT sensors with enhanced resource utilization for providing progressive medical care services. However, the security concerns of these autonomous systems against potential threats are still underdeveloped. Since these IoMT sensor networks carry a bulk of sensitive data, they are susceptible to unobservable False Data Injection Attacks (FDIA), thus jeopardizing patients' health. This paper presents a novel threat-defense analysis framework that establishes an experience-driven approach based on a deep deterministic policy gradient to inject false measurements into IoMT sensors, computing vitals, causing patients' health instability. Subsequently, a privacy-preserved and optimized federated intelligent FDIA detector is deployed to detect malicious activity. The proposed method is parallelizable and computationally efficient to work collaboratively in a dynamic domain. Compared to existing techniques, the proposed threat-defense framework is able to thoroughly analyze severe systems' security holes and combats the risk with lower computing cost and high detection accuracy along with preserving the patients' data privacy.

Emerging applications are placing increasing demands on wireless networks, particularly in terms of ensuring reliable communication for control-related information. However, the complexity of network architectures and the growing number of user devices present significant challenges in achieving reliable multiple access. In this paper, we present a framework that utilizes machine learning (ML) to meet the need for reliable access in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks. The K-means algorithm is employed to cluster users according to their communication reliability requirements, grouping together users with similar demands within each cluster. Each cluster adopts a different access strategy: clusters with lower reliability requirements utilize non-orthogonal multiple access to enhance spectrum efficiency, while clusters with higher reliability requirements employ orthogonal multiple access to ensure reliability. Taking into account the impact of UAV altitude and power allocation schemes on reliability, we propose an iterative algorithm to optimize the UAV altitude and power allocation factors, aiming to maximize UAV coverage while meeting the users’ reliability requirements. The simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed ML-based reliable access scheme, highlighting its potential to enhance the design and deployment of reliable communication in future UAV networks.

The exponential growth of Internet of Things (IoT) devices poses distinctive challenges to safeguarding the security and privacy of interconnected systems. As the frequency of cyberattacks continues to escalate, the development of an effective and scalable Intrusion Detection System (IDS) based on Federated Learning (FL) for IoT becomes increasingly complex. Existing methodologies struggle to balance spatial and temporal feature extraction, particularly when confronted with dynamic and evolving cyber threats. Additionally, the lack of diversity in datasets employed for FL-based IDS evaluations further hinders progress. Furthermore, a notable tradeoff between performance and scalability emerges, particularly as the number of edge devices in communication grows. Motivated by the aforementioned challenges, this article presents a horizontal FL model that combines Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Bidirectional Long-Term Short Memory (BiLSTM) for effective intrusion detection. This hybrid approach aims to address the limitations of existing methods and enhance the effectiveness of intrusion detection in the context of FL for IoT. Specifically, CNN plays a pivotal role in spatial feature extraction, allowing the model to identify and comprehend local patterns indicative of potential intrusions, and the BiLSTM component contributes by capturing temporal dependencies and learning sequential patterns within the data. The proposed IDS adheres to a zero-trust model by keeping the data on local edge devices, sharing only the learned weights with the centralized FL server. In turn, the FL server aggregates updates from diverse sources to optimize the accuracy of the global learning model. The experimental results using CICIDS2017 and Edge-IIoTset prove the effectiveness of the proposed approach over centralized and federated deep learning-based IDS.

The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) has revolutionized healthcare, but its vulnerabilities demand robust security solutions, especially for resource-constrained devices. In this research, we introduce an innovative Software as a Service (SaaS)-based Intrusion Detection System (IDS) designed specifically for the unique challenges of IoMT, deploying at the edge for enhanced efficiency. Our proposed IDS incorporates a multi-faceted approach: Firstly, it leverages the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm for feature engineering, optimizing data representation to reduce computational overhead on resource-constrained devices. Secondly, a diverse ensemble of machine learning and deep learning models is employed to detect a wide array of intrusion attempts within IoMT networks. Thirdly, interpretation is achieved using SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP), providing transparency and understanding of the decision-making process. By combining intelligence, efficiency, explainability, and deploying as a SaaS solution at the network edge, our IDS not only bolsters the security of resource-constrained IoMT devices but also empowers healthcare professionals with actionable insights, ensuring patient data privacy and network integrity in this dynamic and critical domain. Finally, the results using a publicly available healthcare dataset namely WUSTL-EHMS-2020 proves the effectiveness of the proposed IDS over some recent state-of-the-art works.

The deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) systems spans a large variety of applications, each with unique requirements. Many of these applications relate to the management of various cyber–physical systems, including road and rail traffic, electricity, water, food/goods transportation and storage, smart building management, crime/safety management, underwater systems, etc. Within this context, a growing concern is the deployment of IoT systems in extreme environments which may occur either because of the nature of the application or due to external factors. Some prominent examples of the former are 1) the IoT deployments in hazardous environments such as management of chemical or nuclear plants, management of underwater oil/gas infrastructure, mining operations, etc.; 2) IoT systems deployed specifically to manage accidents and disasters; and 3) IoT systems deployed in arctic/antarctic regions where they routinely experience extreme levels of changes in terms of temperature, wind conditions, sunlight availability, compression, etc. Such IoT systems generally are designed to specifically operate in the challenging environment they must operate in, and thus may be expected to be rather robust. However, the IoT systems designed to manage the physical infrastructures such as those in urban settings may also need to handle unprecedented and unexpected stresses due to the worldwide phenomena of aging physical infrastructure, demand that far exceeds the designed capacity, and increasingly extreme operating conditions due to climate change. This special issue covers all such scenarios and thus represents a vast and rich area for innovations.

Vehicle Road Cooperation Systems (VRCS) use next-generation Internet technologies, including 5G, edge computing, and artificial intelligence to improve mobility, comfort, and travel efficiency. Internet of Vehicles (IoV) ecosystem serves as the technological backbone for VRCS by enabling seamless communication and data exchange between vehicles, infrastructure, and traffic management centers. This enables real-time, high-speed communication, efficient data processing, and enhanced security, fostering the development of autonomous driving, smart traffic management, and seamless connectivity within the VRCS ecosystem. At the same time, cyber attacks have become more complex, persistent, organized, and weaponized in IoV network. Threat Intelligence (TI) has emerged as a prominent security approach to obtain a complete view of the dynamically growing cyber threat environment. On the other hand, modeling TI is a challenging task due to the limited labels available for different cyber threat sources. Second, most of the available designs requires a large investment of resources and use hand-crafted features, making the entire process error-prone and time-consuming. To tackle these challenges, this paper presents TIMIF, a deep-learning-based threat intelligence modeling and identification framework for Intelligent IoV and is based on three key modules: first, the proposed TIMIF adopts an Automated Pattern Extractor (APE) module to extract hidden patterns from IoV networks. Employing its output, we design a TI-Based Detection (TIBD) module to detect abnormal behavior and TI-Attack Type Identification (TIATI) module to identify attack types. Extensive experiments are carried out on three different publicly intrusion data sources namely HCRL-car hacking, ToN-IoT and CICIDS-2017 to illustrate the utility of TIMIF framework over some commonly used baselines and state-of-the-art techniques.

Addressing the challenge posed by the unpredictable and recurrent nature of epileptic seizures, which stand among the most significant neurological conditions, remains imperative, especially within settings inundated with high patient flow. The prompt identification of these seizures is paramount for effective patient care. Unfortunately, existing epilepsy seizure detection systems encounter limitations in availability and interpretability, thereby constraining their reliability and widespread application. Presently, neurophysiologists heavily rely on visually interpreting electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings displayed on screens to identify seizures. This article introduces an innovative method dedicated to detecting epileptic seizures within EEG signals, leveraging a specifically tailored fuzzy deep learning (FDL) architecture. The proposed methodology encompasses crucial stages of preprocessing and feature extraction, augmented by the utilization of explainable artificial intelligence models, such as local interpretable model-agnostic explanations (LIME) and Shapley additive explanation (SHAP) for enhancing model interpretability. The developed FDL model demonstrates promising results, achieving a noteworthy accuracy of 92.57%, precision of 0.96 for “normal” and 0.89 for “abnormal,” recall of 0.91 for “normal” and 0.94 for “abnormal,” and F1-score of 0.93 for “normal” and 0.91 for “abnormal,” affirming its robustness in classification tasks. In addition, to validate the effectiveness of the proposed FDL, comparisons are performed with long-short term memory networks and 1-D convolutional neural network model models. The integration of LIME and SHAP significantly enhances the interpretability of the model, providing valuable insights into influential features. This comprehensive framework adeptly balances accuracy and interpretability, thereby making a substantial stride in advancing EEG-based diagnostic tools.

Despite the widespread use of radio frequency identification and wireless connectivity such as near field communication in electric vehicles, their security and privacy implications in Ad-Hoc networks have not been well explored. This article provides a data protection assessment of radio frequency electronic system in the tire pressure monitoring system (TPMS). It is demonstrated that eavesdropping is completely feasible from a passing car, at an approximate distance up to 50 m. Furthermore, our reverse analysis shows that the staticn-bit signatures and messaging can be eavesdropped from a relatively far distance, raising privacy concerns as a vehicles’ movements can be tracked by using the unique IDs of tire pressure sensors. Unfortunately, current protocols do not use authentication, and automobile technologies hardly follow routine message confirmation so sensor messages may be spoofed remotely. To improve the security of TPMS, we suggest a novel ultralightweight mutual authentication for the TPMS registry process in the automotive network. Our experimental results confirm the effectiveness and security of the proposed method in TPMS.

According to research, the vast majority of road accidents (90%) are the result of human error, with only a small percentage (2%) being caused by malfunctions in the vehicle. Smart vehicles have gained significant attention as potential solutions to address such issues. In the future of transportation, travel comfort and road safety will be ensured while also offering several value-added services. The automotive industry has undergone a significant transformation through the use of emerging technologies and wireless communication channels, resulting in vehicles becoming more interconnected, intelligent, and safe. However, these technologies and communication systems are susceptible to numerous security attacks. The objective of this paper is to present a comprehensive overview of the smart vehicle’s architecture, encompassing emerging technologies and security challenges and solutions associated with smart vehicles. There has been a significant surge in the utilization of machine learning techniques in smart vehicles. We categorically discuss common security measures, including machine learning and deep learning based solutions that have been mentioned in the literature and implemented against security threats on smart vehicles. This paper has also been titled a tutorial due to its layout, which begins with covering preliminary knowledge, terminologies, and encompassing technologies required to comprehend smart vehicles. Following this, the paper addresses the overall challenges associated with smart vehicles and then focuses on security issues. In terms of solutions, the paper discusses overall solutions to security issues in smart vehicles before delving into a specific solution based on machine learning and deep learning.

With the rapid development of intelligent transportation systems (ITS), more and more intelligent applications for ITS have received widespread attention, such as the vehicle detection, inference of typical routes, and traffic forecasting. In these applications, deep learning is widely used as a key artificial intelligence technology. However, most ITS providers fail to collect enough labeled traffic data for model training. As a complement to deep learning, transfer learning is an effective way to solve the scarcity of labeled data, which can transfer knowledge from labeled datasets to unlabeled datasets, thus improving the accuracy of prediction and classification. Nevertheless, when the labeled dataset and the unlabeled dataset are held by different entities, it is still unrealistic for two mutually distrustful entities to cooperate in transfer learning regarding data security and privacy preservation. Although some existing works provide privacy-preserving transfer learning methods, such methods fail to apply to traffic data with high sample dimensions due to their high computational cost and round complexity. To address this problem, we design an efficient privacy-preserving distributed transfer learning protocol, which is appropriate for traffic data. Compared to existing works, our protocol addresses the privacy-preserving problem of transfer learning for traffic data with high sample dimensions. In addition, our protocol has fewer interaction rounds and can be proved in the semi-honest model. Finally, we validate the effectiveness, efficiency and security of the proposed protocol via experiments. Furthermore, we show the application of the proposed protocol in intelligent transportation systems.

Malicious URLs present significant threats to businesses, such as transportation and banking, causing disruptions in business operations. It is essential to identify these URLs; however, existing Machine Learning models are vulnerable to backdoor attacks. These attacks involve manipulating a small portion of the training data labels, such as Label Flipping, which can lead to misclassification. Therefore, it is crucial to incorporate defense mechanisms into machine-learning models to protect against such attacks. The focus of this study is on backdoor attacks in the context of URL detection using ensemble trees. By illuminating the motivations behind such attacks, highlighting the roles of attackers, and emphasizing the critical importance of effective defense strategies, this paper contributes to the ongoing efforts to fortify machine-learning models against adversarial threats within the machine-learning domain in network security. We propose an innovative alarm system that detects the presence of poisoned labels and a defense mechanism designed to uncover the original class labels with the aim of mitigating backdoor attacks on ensemble tree classifiers. We conducted a case study using the Alexa and Phishing Site URL datasets and showed that label-flipping attacks can be addressed using our proposed defense mechanism. Our experimental results prove that the Label Flipping attack achieved an Attack Success Rate between 50-65% within 2-5%, and the innovative defense method successfully detected poisoned labels with an accuracy of up to 100%.

The Boolean functions satisfying secure properties on the restricted sets of inputs are studied recently due to their importance in the framework of the FLIP stream cipher. However, finding Boolean functions with optimal cryptographic properties is an open research problem in the cryptographic community. This paper presents an Improved Genetic Algorithm (IGA) with the directed changes that keep the weightwise balancedness of Boolean functions. A cross-protection strategy is proposed to ensure that the offspring has the same weightwise balancedness characteristics of the parents while implementing crossover. Then, a large number of weightwise (almost) perfectly balanced (W(A)PB) functions with a good nonlinearity profile are obtained based on IGA. Finally, we make comparisons between our constructions and relevant works. The comparisons show that IGA has a significant advantage for reaching the W(A)PB functions with high weightwise nonlinearity. Moreover, it is the first time to obtain the 8-variable WPB functions with the weightwise nonlinearity of 28 in the restricted sets of inputs with Hamming weight of 4, and list the statistical indicators of the weightwise nonlinearity for W(A)PB functions for input size n = 9, 10.

Privacy has long been considered a fundamental component of consumer services. Privacy decreases the possibility of consumers revealing confidential information in terms of customer service. However, it also refers to service pleasure, flexibility, and convenience. This study formally analyzes the trade-off between privacy and openness in financial services. Because if the consumer favors privacy above openness, they may have limited freedom in the service provider’s service, and vice versa. As a result, it is critical to choose the optimum solution to balance the trade-off. In this paper, we used the bilateral conflict concept to analyze the trade-off problem to achieve Nash equilibrium by controlling the quantity of information. We demonstrated that Nash equilibrium can be reached if two requirements are satisfied: (i) there is inequality in benefits for both the information owner and the decision maker, and (ii) there is inequality in benefits just for the information owner.

The integration of the Internet of Things (IoT) with traditional healthcare systems has improved quality of healthcare services. However, the wearable devices and sensors used in Healthcare System (HS) continuously monitor and transmit data to the nearby devices or servers using an unsecured open channel. This connectivity between IoT devices and servers improves operational efficiency, but it also gives a lot of room for attackers to launch various cyber-attacks that can put patients under critical surveillance in jeopardy. In this article, a Blockchain-orchestrated Deep learning approach for Secure Data Transmission in IoT-enabled healthcare system hereafter referred to as “BDSDT” is designed. Specifically, first a novel scalable blockchain architecture is proposed to ensure data integrity and secure data transmission by leveraging Zero Knowledge Proof (ZKP) mechanism. Then, BDSDT integrates with the off-chain storage InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) to address difficulties with data storage costs and with an Ethereum smart contract to address data security issues. The authenticated data is further used to design a deep learning architecture to detect intrusion in HS network. The latter combines Deep Sparse AutoEncoder (DSAE) with Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) to design an effective intrusion detection system. Experiments on two public data sources (CICIDS-2017 and ToN-IoT) reveal that the proposed BDSDT outperformed state-of-the-arts in both non-blockchain and blockchain settings and have obtained accuracy close to 99% using both datasets.

This article proposes an improved Bayesian scheme by focusing on the region in which Bayesian may fail to correctly identify labels and improve classification performance by handling those errors. Bayesian method, as a probabilistic classifier, uses Bayes’ theorem to calculate the probability of an instance belonging to a class, where the class label with a maximum probability is assigned to the instance. In a spam detection problem, it can be considered that the prediction of the Bayesian classifier is weak when the probability obtained for classes spam and non-spam are close to each other. Therefore, we define a threshold to determine weak prediction against strong prediction. A hybrid strategy using a two-layer Bayesian approach is presented: basic Bayesian (BBayes) and corrected weak region Bayesian (CWRBayes), which are concerned with strong and weak predictions, respectively. Both techniques, BBayes and CWRBayes, have the same classification mechanism, but they use different feature selection mechanisms. The proposed methods are implemented and evaluated over two datasets of spam e-mails, and the results show that the proposed method has better performance than the baseline of the naïve Bayesian and some other Bayesian variants.

Social data analytics is often taken as the most commonly used method for community discovery, product recommendations, knowledge graph, and so on. In this study, social data are firstly represented in different feature spaces by using various feature extraction algorithms. Then we build a transfer learning model to leverage knowledge from multiple feature spaces. During modeling, since the assumption that the training and the testing data have the same distribution is always true, we give a theorem and its proof which asserts the necessary and sufficient condition for achieving a minimum testing error. We also theoretically demonstrate that maximizing the classification error consistency across different feature spaces can improve the classification performance. Additionally, the cluster assumption derived from semi-supervised learning is introduced to enhance knowledge transfer. Finally, aTagaki-Sugeno-Kang (TSK)fuzzy system-based learning algorithm is proposed, which can generate interpretable fuzzy rules. Experimental results not only demonstrate the promising social data classification performance of our proposed approach but also show its interpretability which is missing in many other models.

Recent advancements in the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) technology have pathed the way for the use of various smart services for the management of urban traffic, including authentication and key management. Key management protocols are an important means of addressing security and privacy concerns. However, they can be resource-intensive in terms of network traffic and workload management, particularly at times of traffic congestion, which in turn can increase the ECU and RSU processing load and adversely impact network communications. This paper introduces a more efficient key management method, named AI-enabled and Layered Key Management (ALKM), which uses an Artificial Intelligence (AI) approach and a layered workflow to reduce network traffic and workload. Specifically, the ALKM distributes dynamic synchronous time-dependent keys among Road Side Units (RSUs) rather than static cryptographic keys. It provides three layers of secure communications: public, tunnel, and hierarchy. The public layer creates a flat secure layer between the Traffic Management Center (TMC) and all RSUs. Using AI-enabled features, the tunnel layer predicts short-term and long-term congestion areas by analysis of the acquired trajectory data, and then establishes a secure communication channel between the selected RSUs and the TMC. In the hierarchy layer, in multiple tiers, the TMC and higher-level RSUs assist lower RSUs in message decryption (but not vice-versa). Our extensive analysis shows that the ALKM generates overall between 48% and 99% less network traffic per generated key than the Master Key method, depending on the operational lifetime of the keys used.

The rapid development of the Internet of Vehicles has substantially boosted the prevalence of vehicular social networks (VSN). However, content security has gradually been a latent threat to the stable operation of VSN. The VSN is a time-varying environment and mixed with various real or fake contents, which brings great challenges to the sustainability of VSN. To establish a sustainable VSN, it is of practical value to possess a strong ability for fake content detection. Related works can be divided into the global semantics-based approaches and the local semantics-based approaches, though both with limitations. Leveraging these two different approaches, this paper proposes a fake content detection model based on the mixed graph neural networks (GNN) for sustainable VSN. It takes GNN as the bottom architecture and integrates both convolution neural networks and recurrent neural networks to capture two aspects of semantics. Such a mixed detection framework is expected to possess a better detection effect. A number of experiments were conducted on two social network datasets for evaluation, and the results indicated that the detection effect can be improved by about 5%-15% compared with baseline methods.

As a fast-growing and promising technology, Internet of Things (IoT) significantly promotes the informationization and intelligentization of Maritime Transportation System (MTS). The massive data collected during the voyage is usually disposed of with the assistance of cloud or edge computing, which imposes serious cyber security threats. For multifarious cyber-attacks, Intrusion Detection System (IDS) is one of the efficient mechanisms to prevent IoT devices from network intrusion. However, most of the methods based on deep learning train their models in a centralized manner, which needs uploading all data to the central server for training, increasing the risk of privacy disclosure. In this paper, we consider the characteristics of IoT-based MTS and propose a CNN-MLP based model for intrusion detection which is trained through Federated Learning, named FedBatch. Federated Learning keeps the model training local and only updates the global model through the exchange of model parameters, preserving the privacy of local data on vessels. First, the characteristics of the communication between different vessels are discussed to model the federated learning process during the voyage. Then, the lightweight local model constructed by Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Multi-Layer Perception (MLP) is designed to save on computing and storage overhead. Moreover, to mitigate the straggler problem during the federated learning in MTS, we proposed an adaptive aggregation method, named Batch Federated Aggregation, which suppresses the oscillations of model parameters during federated learning. Finally, the simulation results on the NSL-KDD dataset demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of FedBatch.

Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANET), as an inseparable part of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), enable data communication between vehicles to promote road safety and traffic efficiency. But adversaries can also spread false information across these networks. Therefore, vehicles’ cognitive capabilities with respect to received data must be improved. This requires spatial intelligence and a mechanism to evaluate the trustworthiness of received data. But the dynamic nature of VANETs with intermittent connections, lack of infrastructure and real-time constraints make fulfilling this task very challenging. In this paper, we propose a trust-aware cognitive framework that exploits the redundancies in the exchanged DENM and CAM packets as well as spatial intelligence to filter malicious messages and prevent attackers from disrupting network operation. A novel supplementary mechanism is also presented that applies subjective logic on the pieces of information collected from all network vehicles to detect and isolate malicious entities. To assess the reliability of the proposed scheme, we made extensive comparisons between our model and two others. In the obtained results, our approach outperformed both of them and yielded an accuracy of over 90%, even when 50% of network participants were attackers. The supplementary malicious node detection mechanism of ours similarly yielded high accuracy and F1 scores in the simulations.

There has been a recent surge of success in optimizing deep reinforcement learning (DRL) models with neural evolutionary algorithms. This type of method is inspired by biological evolution and uses different genetic operations to evolve neural networks. Previous neural evolutionary algorithms mainly focused on single-objective optimization problems (SOPs). In this article, we present an end-to-end multi-objective neural evolutionary algorithm based on decomposition and dominance (MONEADD) for combinatorial optimization problems. The proposed MONEADD is an end-to-end algorithm that utilizes genetic operations and rewards signals to evolve neural networks for different combinatorial optimization problems without further engineering. To accelerate convergence, a set of nondominated neural networks is maintained based on the notion of dominance and decomposition in each generation. In inference time, the trained model can be directly utilized to solve similar problems efficiently, while the conventional heuristic methods need to learn from scratch for every given test problem. To further enhance the model performance in inference time, three multi-objective search strategies are introduced in this work. Our experimental results clearly show that the proposed MONEADD has a competitive and robust performance on a bi-objective of the classic travel salesman problem (TSP), as well as Knapsack problem up to 200 instances. We also empirically show that the designed MONEADD has good scalability when distributed on multiple graphics processing units (GPUs).

Resilience is an increasingly important concept in current socio-economic landscapes. Due to the competitive global context and security attacks, the organisations are looking for realistic resilience assessments for operations of their digital networks. This study proposes a node Operational Resilience evaluation based on the fuzzy logic by assessing various cyber security dynamics; including node threat protection, avoiding degradation, attack identification and recovery vectors. Through extensive experiments and analysis, we reached to a better understanding of diverse relationships between cyber security factors for the evaluation of Operational Resilience.

With the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) services and applications in the Cyber Physical Systems (CPS), the methods of protecting CPS against cyber threats is becoming more and more challenging. Various security solutions are implemented to protect CPS networks from cyber attacks. For instance, Machine Learning (ML) methods have been deployed to automate the process of anomaly detection in CPS environments. The core of ML is deep learning. However, it has been found that deep learning is vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Attackers can launch the attack by applying perturbations to input samples to mislead the model, which results in incorrect predictions and low accuracy. For example, the Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM) is a white-box attack that calculates gradient descent oppositely to maximize the loss and generates perturbations by adding the gradient to unpolluted data. In this study, we focus on the impact of adversarial attacks on deep learning-based anomaly detection in CPS networks and implement a mitigation approach against the attack by retraining models using adversarial samples. We use the Bot-IoT and Modbus IoT datasets to represent the two CPS networks. We train deep learning models and generate adversarial samples using these datasets. These datasets are captured from IoT and Industrial IoT (IIoT) networks. They both provide samples of normal and attack activities. The deep learning model trained with these datasets showed high accuracy in detecting attacks. An Artificial Neural Network (ANN) is adopted with one input layer, four intermediate layers, and one output layer. The output layer has two nodes representing the binary classification results. To generate adversarial samples for the experiment, we used a function called the 'fast_gradient_method’ from the Cleverhans library. The experimental result demonstrates the influence of FGSM adversarial samples on the accuracy of the predictions and proves the effectiveness of using the retrained model to defend against adversarial attacks.

A Multisource Inverter (MSI) comprises several DC sources in the input that can be combined together with varying voltage levels to operate at different loads to reduce the battery size of electric vehicles. Different multisource inverter configurations have been presented recently in the literature. These structures use two DC sources to operate at different demand loads by using a low battery size. The weakness of these multisource inverters is that they use a high number of power switches. In addition, these structures cannot connect two DC used sources together in series to operate under a heavy load, which increases the battery's size, increases high power losses, and reduces efficiency due to a high number of switches. This paper proposes a new topology for multisource inverters that reduces the power electronics switches and the battery size due to generating four combinations between the two used DC sources in the proposed technique. The proposed multisource topology is controlled by the model predictive due to its popular advantages. The performance of the proposal is verified through simulation results in Matlab. The results show that the MPC is a good alternative for such applications due to its simplicity, high performance, and low harmonic content.

The transformer-based inverters in PV systems increase the weight, size, and cost of the inverter while reducing efficiency. This research presents a new PV inverter topology to increase efficiency using a reduction of dc-link. The proposed multilevel inverter is comprised of six power switches, one discrete diode, and three capacitors to produce five voltage levels. The proposed inverter is connected to a PV panel at input and a local grid at output to inject a sinusoidal current waveform into the grid. To control the grid current, a finite set model predictive control is needed to evaluate the proposed inverter. A comparison study is carried out between the proposal and other five-level inverters to verify the strengths and weaknesses of the proposed multilevel inverter. Finally, to demonstrate the performance of the proposed multilevel inverter, the simulation results are presented in the MATLAB/Simulink environment.

Cognitive smart

For secure communication in a distributed cooperation, generally, the data are encrypted and decrypted using a symmetric key. The process of creating, distributing, storing, deploying, and finally revoking the cryptographic keys is called key management. On the basis of the structure, usability, and complexity of the cyber-physical systems, each one of the current key management practices is suitable for a specific range of applications. However, these schemes have some drawbacks in common, such as complicated key generation and distribution process, using key storage, attacks, and traffic load. This paper proposes a key management model for establishing secure communications in the distributed industrial intelligent systems. The model is attack resistant, has high usability in real-world applications, and transforms the current customary key management workflow to enhance security and reduce weaknesses. Its main features include reduced process, intelligent attack resistance, producing dynamic keys with no additional cost, and eliminating key storage and revocation calls.

Internet of Things (IoT) devices are becoming ubiquitous in our lives, with applications spanning from theconsumerdomain tocommercialandindustrialsystems. The steep growth and vast adoption of IoT devices reinforce the importance of sound and robust cybersecurity practices during the device development life cycles. IoT-related vulnerabilities, if successfully exploited can affect, not only the device itself but also the application field in which the IoT device operates. Evidently, identifying and addressing every single vulnerability are an arduous, if not impossible, task. Attack taxonomies can assist in classifying attacks and their corresponding vulnerabilities. Security countermeasures and best practices can then be leveraged to mitigate threats and vulnerabilities before they emerge into catastrophic attacks and ensure overall secure IoT operation. Therefore, in this article, we provide an attack taxonomy, which takes into consideration the different layers of the IoT stack, i.e., device, infrastructure, communication, and service, and each layer’s designated characteristics, which can be exploited by adversaries. Furthermore, using nine real-world cybersecurity incidents that had targeted IoT devices deployed in the consumer, commercial, and industrial sectors, we describe the IoT-related vulnerabilities, exploitation procedures, attacks, impacts, and potential mitigation mechanisms and protection strategies. These (and many other) incidents highlight the underlying security concerns of IoT systems and demonstrate the potential attack impacts of such connected ecosystems, while the proposed taxonomy provides a systematic procedure to categorize attacks based on the affected layer and corresponding impact.

Text sentiment classification is an important technology for natural language processing. A fuzzy system is a strong tool for processing imprecise or ambiguous data, and it can be used for text sentiment analysis. This article proposes a new formulation of a multi-task Takagi-Sugeno-Kang fuzzy system (TSK FS) modeling, which can be used for text sentiment image classification. Using a novel multi-task fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm, the common (public) information among all tasks and the individual (private) information for each task are extracted. The information about clustering, for example, cluster centers, can be used to learn the antecedent parameters of multi-task TSK fuzzy systems. With the common and individual antecedent parameters obtained, a corresponding multi-task learning mechanism for learning consequent parameters is devised. Accordingly, a multi-task fuzzy clustering–based multi-task TSK fuzzy system (MTFCM-MT-TSK-FS) is proposed. When the proposed model is built, the information conveyed by the fuzzy rules formed is two-fold, including (1) common fuzzy rules representing the inter-task correlation information and (2) individual fuzzy rules depicting the independent information of each task. The experimental results on several text sentiment datasets demonstrate the validity of the proposed model.

Nowadays, online spamming has already been a remarkable threat to contents security of Internet of Things. Due to constant technical progress, online spamming activities have been more and more concealed. This brings much fuzziness to spammer detection scenarios, yielding the issue of fuzzy detection of spammers. Although existing detection techniques for spammers utilized idea of deep learning, they still ignore to release power of label spaces. As real nature about a user may be usually fuzzy, but the label annotated for a user is always certain. To remedy such gap, this article proposes a label smoothing-based fuzzy detection method for spammers (Fuz-Spam). First of all, deep representation is still utilized to deeply fuse features, which acts as the foundation of neural computing. On this basis, generative adversarial learning is introduced to transform previous label spaces into distributed forms. In addition, two groups of experiments are carried out on two real-world datasets for evaluation. The results demonstrate that the Fuz-Spam improves identification efficiency about 10% to 20% than previous ones, and that the Fuz-Spam is endowed with proper stability.

With the rapid development of Industry 4.0, the industrial cyber-physical systems (ICPS) are expected to realize the digital sensing, automatic control, and refined management in smart factories. However, limited bandwidth resources and severe industrial interference make it difficult to meet the real-time and ultrahigh reliability in edge computing (EC)-based next-generation industrial automation networks. To tackle these challenges, in this article, we propose a real-time transmission optimization scheme to accelerate EC. First, we establish a hierarchical system model for smart manufacturing and automation scenarios. Then we present a power control optimization method based on noncooperative game to alleviate interference and reduce energy consumption. Finally, we propose a path optimization scheme based on Q-learning for low-latency and ultrahigh reliability transmission requirements. Extensive simulation results reveal that our proposals perform better in terms of transmission delay and packet-loss rate compared with traditional methods, and therefore, contributes to EC deployment in ICPS.

As an effective distributed renewable energy utilization paradigm, a microgrid is expected to realize the high integration of the industrial cyber-physical systems (CPS), which has attracted extensive attention from academia and industry. However, the real-time interaction and feedback loop between physical systems and cyber systems have posed severe challenges to the reliability, determinacy, and energy efficiency of the multiway flow of information and communication transmission. In order to solve the problem of slot scheduling and data transmission (SSDT) in the microgrid, a novel real-time deterministic scheduling (RTDS) scheme for industrial CPS is proposed in this article. First, the SSDT is formulated as a multiway flow scheduling problem, and it is theoretically proved that the SSDT problem is NP-hard. Then, the RTDS scheme designs two heuristic algorithms: scheduling request preprocessing and greedy-based multichannel time slot allocation for an optimal scheduling solution. Practical experimental results demonstrate that the proposed RTDS scheme has significant advantages in packet loss rate, deadline guarantee rate, and energy consumption compared with the traditional schemes, and thus, is more suitable for deployment in microgrid systems.

The advent of Industry 4.0 facilitates the Int- ernet-of-Things-based-transactive energy system (IoTES), which enables innovative services with numerous independent distributed systems. These systems generate heterogeneous data in bulk, which become susceptible to cyber-attacks, particularly the stealthy false data injection attacks (FDIAs). The existing centralized FDIA detection algorithms often breach data privacy and fail to perform effectively in highly dynamic and distributed environments, such as IoTES. To resolve the issue, initially, a recurrent deep deterministic policy gradient is utilized to invent an experience-driven FDIA in a complex IoTES. The attacker intends to intelligently exploit the data integrity of smart energy meters with insufficient knowledge of the system. Subsequently, to countermove the stealth and enable independent clients to train a centralized model while keeping each client’s data privacy intact, a deep-federated-learning-based decentralized FDIA detection method using an attentive aggregation is exploited in this article. The proposed approach is capable of parallel computing and can reliably identify the stealthy FDIA on all the nodes simultaneously. Simulation results validate that the proposed scheme outperforms the state-of-the-art methods under a distributed environment with a significantly higher detection accuracy and lower computational complexity while keeping the data privacy intact.

With the development of 5G technology and Internet of Things, all kinds of real life data are collected and recorded by a large number of sensors. It is of great significance to mine and analyze the hidden information in the data for applications like future prediction. However, due to interferences or instability of collection equipment, collected sensory data are often incomplete, and this incompleteness hinders the in-depth analysis of data in the cloud. Therefore, processing around missing values is significant. Relying on cloud machine learning methods is not enough to deal with the problem of missing data in the Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) environment, however, edge computing provides a promising solution. In this article, gated recurrent units filling is employed at the edge nodes. A mobile edge node can not only find the historical information of the current missing data node but also acquire the data of the nodes adjacent to the missing data node. These ensure that the missing data are restored to the maximum extent at the source. The experimental results show that the missing value filling based on edge computing not only outperforms other filling methods in quality but also greatly reduces the energy consumption in AIoT.

The Internet of Things (IoT) growth is extremely fast and it now has found its way to healthcare applications too. Many smart health gadgets and devices are helping practitioners in collecting medical information and monitoring patients. In this distributed system, information or service is sometimes shared and used by other devices. Considering the importance of health-related information and the decisions made based on it, there should be some sort of assurance on the security and quality of the services or information provided. Trust management is an efficient means of promoting application security and reliability in these cases. However, due to some limitations that are specific to IoT, traditional trust evaluation algorithms cannot be employed or do not yield satisfactory results. In this paper, evidence theory is exploited to design a decentralized service-oriented trust management model for healthcare IoT. A measure of evidence distance is used to reward well-behaving healthcare service/information providers as well as referrers and punish malicious entities. In this context-aware model, trust is estimated based on direct experiences and indirect feedbacks of recommenders. The process runs in two contexts; trust to healthcare service and trust to recommendation. When personal direct experience does not exist, trust to a source or service is estimated by applying the combinatorial laws of evidence theory and integrating indirect trust values. The proposed model is secure against bad-mouthing, good-mouthing, and on-off attacks due to its dynamic parameters and using the concept of evidence distance. Our results confirm the robustness and efficiency of this scheme.

With recent developments in communication technologies, vehicular networks have become a reality with various applications. However, the cybersecurity aspect of vehicular networks is still an open issue that needs to be addressed with novel defence mechanisms against attacks. This paper first presents the state-of-the-art communication technologies in vehicular networks (either inter-vehicle networking or in-vehicle networking) along with their applications. Then we explore novel technologies including machine learning and blockchain as cybersecurity defence mechanisms in vehicular networks. Based on the extensive survey, we highlight some insights for future research to secure vehicular networks.

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), particularly Autonomous Vehicles (AVs), are susceptible to safety and security concerns that impend people’s lives. Nothing like manually controlled vehicles, the safekeeping of communications and computing constituents of AVs can be threatened using sophisticated hacking techniques, consequently disrupting AVs from the operative usage in our daily life routines. Once manually controlled vehicles are linked to the Internet, so-called the Internet of Vehicles (IoVs), they would be misused by cyberattacks. In this paper, we present a multi-stage intrusion detection framework to identify intrusions from ITSs and produce low rate of false alarms. The proposed framework can automatically distinguish intrusions in real-time. The proposed framework is based on normal state-based and a deep learning-centered bidirectional Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) architecture to efficiently discover intrusions from the fundamental network gateways and communication networks of AVs. The designed framework is evaluated through two benchmark datasources, that is, the UNSWNB-15 datasource for exterior network communications and the car hacking datasource for in-vehicle communications. The outcomes indicated that the proposed framework achieves high performance that outperforms various current state-of-the-art systems with an accuracy rate of 98.88% for the UNSWNB-15 dataset and 99.11% for the car hacking dataset. Besides, the proposed framework is furthermore capable to detect zero-day (concealed) outbreaks from IoVs networks.

The integration of advanced sensing, signal processing, deep learning, and edge computing into vehicles is enabling intelligent automated vehicles that can navigate autonomously in various environments. There are several exciting developments in new technologies that may contribute to the improvement of the robustness of autonomous vehicles and thus making them safer on the road. However, the development of suitable context prediction methodologies in order to provide proactive behavior for intelligent transportations remains a challenge. The reason is that future context information, hidden in the raw context traces left by users in the real world, is not immediately accessible to applications. Therefore, sophisticated context prediction approaches are required that could discover and mine patterns (e.g., of a driver’s behavior) from observed context history. The major challenge of a context prediction approach is in the prediction accuracy and prediction expressiveness. Neural networks along with deep-learning methods have shown noticeably better performance in comparison with previous methods regarding the accuracy of the outcomes. However, deep learning also issues more complexity and interpretability problems and, hence, arises serious challenges regarding the verifiability of these approaches. This Special Issue aims to provide the scientific community with a comprehensive overview of innovative technologies, advanced architectures, and potential challenges for context prediction of autonomous vehicles.

An important security requirement in automotive networks is to authenticate, sign, and verify thousands of short messages per second by each vehicle. This requirement mandates the use of a high speed Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) hardware. The Residue Number Systems (RNS) provide a natural parallelism and carry-free operations that could speed-up long integer arithmetics of cryptographic algorithms. In this article, we propose a high-speed RNS Montgomery modular reduction units with parallel computing to reduce the latency of the field modular operations. We propose a fully RNS-based ECC scalar multiplication co-processor for NIST-P256r1 and Brainpool256r1 standard curves and improved the scalar multiplication speed using NAF and DBC numbering systems. Compared to the literature, our scheme provides faster computation without compromising the security level. The performance of our fully RNS-ECC point multiplication meets the requirements of the automotive industry.

Edge computing, as a relatively recent evolution of cloud computing architecture, is the newest way for enterprises to distribute computational power and lower repetitive referrals to central authorities. In the edge computing environment, Generative Models (GMs) have been found to be valuable and useful in machine learning tasks such as data augmentation and data pre-processing. Federated learning and distributed learning refer to training machine learning models in the edge computing network. However, federated learning and distributed learning also bring additional risks to GMs since all peers in the network have access to the model under training. In this article, we study the vulnerabilities of federated GMs to data-poisoning-based backdoor attacks via gradient uploading. We additionally enhance the attack to reduce the required poisonous data samples and cope with dynamic network environments. Last but not least, the attacks are formally proven to be stealthy and effective toward federated GMs. According to the experiments, neural backdoors can be successfully embedded by including merely 5\% poisonous samples in the local training dataset of an attacker.

No abstract available.

No abstract available.

With recent advances in autonomous driving, voice control systems have become increasingly adopted as human-vehicle interaction methods. This technology enables drivers to use voice commands to control the vehicle and will be soon available in Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). Prior work has shown that Siri, Alexa and Cortana, are highly vulnerable to inaudible command attacks. This could be extended to ADAS in real-world applications and such an inaudible command threat is difficult to detect due to microphone nonlinearities. In this paper, we aim to develop a more practical solution by using camera views to defend against inaudible command attacks where ADAS are capable of detecting their environment via multi-sensors. To this end, we propose a novel multimodal deep learning classification system to defend against inaudible command attacks. Our experimental results confirm the feasibility of the proposed defense methods and the best classification accuracy reaches 89.2%. Code is available at https://github.com/ITSEG-MQ/Sensor-Fusion-Against-VoiceCommand-Attacks.

Recent anticipated advancements in ad hoc Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) have made them strong natural candidates for Smart Grid’s Neighborhood Area Network (NAN) and the ongoing work on Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI). Fault detection in these types of energy systems has recently shown lots of interest in the data science community, where anomalous behavior from energy platforms is identified. This paper develops a new framework based on privacy reinforcement learning to accurately identify anomalous patterns in a distributed and heterogeneous energy environment. The local outlier factor is first performed to derive the local simple anomalous patterns in each site of the distributed energy platform. A reinforcement privacy learning is then established using blockchain technology to merge the local anomalous patterns into global complex anomalous patterns. Besides, different optimization strategies are suggested to improve the whole outlier detection process. To demonstrate the applicability of the proposed framework, intensive experiments have been carried out on well-known CASAS (Center of Advanced Studies in Adaptive Systems) platform. Our results show that our proposed framework outperforms the baseline fault detection solutions.

Industry 4.0 will make manufacturing processes smarter but this smartness requires more environmental awareness, which in case of Industrial Internet of Things, is realized by the help of sensors. This article is about industrial pharmaceutical systems and more specifically, water purification systems. Purified water which has certain conductivity is an important ingredient in many pharmaceutical products. Almost every pharmaceutical company has a water purifying unit as a part of its interdependent systems. Early detection of faults right at the edge can significantly decrease maintenance costs and improve safety and output quality, and as a result, lead to the production of better medicines. In this article, with the help of a few sensors and data mining approaches, an anomaly detection system is built for CHRIST Osmotron water purifier. This is a practical research with real-world data collected from SinaDarou Labs Co. Data collection was done by using six sensors over two-week intervals before and after system overhaul. This gave us normal and faulty operation samples. Given the data, we propose two anomaly detection approaches to build up our edge fault detection system. The first approach is based on supervised learning and data mining, e.g., by support vector machines. However, since we cannot collect all possible faults data, an anomaly detection approach is proposed based on normal system identification which models the system components by artificial neural networks. Extensive experiments are conducted with the data set generated in this study to show the accuracy of the data-driven and model-based anomaly detection methods.

Due to memory and processing limitations, Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices require external fog servers to perform some of their tasks. However, this offloading of tasks comes at the cost of more interactions whose security cannot be guaranteed without the authentication and key management scheme. Traditional prescriptions, such as those used for securing the Web, require referring to central agents, such as certificate authorities (CA) or online certificate status protocol (OCSP) responders, that sit in the cloud. This poses many challenges, including additional communication costs and repetitive delays which work against the low latency and energy efficiency goals of edge networking. In this article, we propose a novel semidecentralized public-key management scheme for smart IoT systems in which devices intelligently decide whether to look for the keying material locally at the edge or refer to the cloud for this purpose. The result is a security architecture that links IoT devices, fog servers, and cloud, but with minimal dependency on the latter. In the proposed solution, devices work collaboratively to deliver revocation lists and digital certificates of fog servers to each other. The decision to go for edge nodes or cloud CA/OCSP responders is made intelligently by each node upon learning its neighborhood and network statistics. The core idea is based on the Web of trust, but unlike that, whenever a material is not found locally, cloud servers are queried. Experiments show that through this intelligent approach, the cost of key management operations, e.g., delay, can be reduced by up to 50%.

6G will be an enabler for the massive Internet of Things (IoT) in which millions of devices communicate at high data rates and low latencies. One key area among 6G applications is advanced sensing. However, higher speed implies moving to higher frequencies, which generally require more transmission power. In remote sensing, this causes problems, since either we have to increase the number of sensors and lower their communications ranges or increase their ranges and accept faster battery depletion. To cut the cost, even localization modules are not usually included in sensors. However, in many applications, IoT sensors must know their locations. Recent advances in the field of drones have led to promising solutions for localization. In this article, we propose a novel approach called semidynamic mobile anchor guiding (SEDMAG) for drones which aims at energy-conservative trajectory planning and localization of massive IoT devices. In this approach, the drone tracks the shortest path over a connected graph. This path determines the visiting order of devices. But we show that the complexity of this approach is high, thus, a graph reduction approach is proposed. It reduces the complexity and decreases the drones' energy consumption and positioning delay. The drone then follows a weighted search algorithm (WSA) to dynamically visit the devices. Simulation results are used to verify the superiority of the proposed approach.

Federated learning (FL) is a promising new technology in the field of IoT intelligence. However, exchanging model-related data in FL may leak the sensitive information of participants. To address this problem, we propose a novel privacy-preserving FL framework based on an innovative chained secure multiparty computing technique, named chain-PPFL. Our scheme mainly leverages two mechanisms: 1) single-masking mechanism that protects information exchanged between participants and 2) chained-communication mechanism that enables masked information to be transferred between participants with a serial chain frame. We conduct extensive simulation-based experiments using two public data sets (MNIST and CIFAR-100) by comparing both training accuracy and leak defence with other state-of-the-art schemes. We set two data sample distributions (IID and NonIID) and three training models (CNN, MLP, and L-BFGS) in our experiments. The experimental results demonstrate that the chain-PPFL scheme can achieve practical privacy preservation (equivalent to differential privacy with ∈ approaching zero) for FL with some cost of communication and without impairing the accuracy and convergence speed of the training model.

To process data like text and speech, Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a valuable tool. As on of NLP’s upstream tasks, sequence labeling is a vital part of NLP through techniques like text classification, machine translation, and sentiment analysis. In this paper, our focus is on sequence labeling where we assign semantic labels within input sequences. We present two novel frameworks, namely SA-CRFLV-I and SA-CRFLV-II, that use latent variables within random fields. These frameworks make use of an encoding schema in the form of a latent variable to be able to capture the latent structure in the observed data. SA-CRFLV-I shows the best performance at the sentence level whereas SA-CRFLV-II works best at the word level. In our in-depth experimental results, we compare our frameworks with 4 well-known sequence prediction methodologies which include NER, reference parsing, chunking as well as POS tagging. The proposed frameworks are shown to have better performance in terms of many well-known metrics.

Summary DNA signals mainly differ from standard digital signals due to their biological data contents. Owing to unique properties of DNA signals the conventional signal processing techniques, such as digital filters, suffers with spectral leakage and results in insignificant noise suppression in DNA sequence analysis. This article presents an intelligent noise suppression window filter (INSWF) for DNA signal analysis. The filter demises the signal by separating high‐level frequency contents and by identifying nucleotides with high fuzzy membership contribution at particular locations. The nucleotide contents of signals are later filtered by application of median filtering employing a combination of s‐shaped and z‐shaped filters. The fundamental characteristic of codons usage that causes uneven nucleotides segmentation has been tackled by finding the best fit of the curve in biological contents of filter. One of the fuzzy correlations existing between codons and median that nucleotides incorporated to reduce the signal noise to a larger magnitude. TheINSWFfilter outperformed the existing fixed‐length digital filters tested over 250 benchmarked and random datasets of various species. A notable enhancement of 45% to 130% was achieved by significantly suppressing signal noise as compared with conventional digital filters in DNA sequence analysis.

Summary Internet of Things (IoT) is finding application in many areas, particularly in health care where an IoT can be effectively used in the form of an Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) to monitor the patients remotely. The quality of life of the patients and health care outcomes can be improved with the deployment of an IoMT because health care professionals can monitor conditions; access the electronic medical records and communicates with each other. This remote monitoring and consultations might reduce the traditional stressful and costly exercise of frequent hospitalization. Also, the rising costs of health care in many developed countries have influenced the introduction of the Healthcare Monitoring Application (HMA) to their existing health care practices. To materialize the HMA concepts for successful deployment for civilian and commercial use with ease, application developers can benefit from a generic, scalable framework that provides significant components for building an HMA. In this chapter, a generic maintainable HMA is advanced by amalgamating the advantages of event‐driven and the layered architecture. The proposed framework is used to establish an HMA with an end‐to‐end Assistive Care Loop Framework (ACLF) to provide a real‐time alarm and assistance to monitor pregnant women.

Topic modeling is an unsupervised learning task that discovers the hidden topics in a collection of documents. In turn, the discovered topics can be used for summarizing, organizing, and understanding the documents in the collection. Most of the existing techniques for topic modeling are derivatives of the Latent Dirichlet Allocation which uses a bag-of-word assumption for the documents. However, bag-of-words models completely dismiss the relationships between the words. For this reason, this article presents a two-stage algorithm for topic modelling that leverages word embeddings and word co-occurrence. In the first stage, we determine the topic-word distributions by soft-clustering a random set of embedded n -grams from the documents. In the second stage, we determine the document-topic distributions by sampling the topics of each document from the topic-word distributions. This approach leverages the distributional properties of word embeddings instead of using the bag-of-words assumption. Experimental results on various data sets from an Australian compensation organization show the remarkable comparative effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in a task of document classification.

Brain-Computer interfaces (BCIs) enhance the capability of human brain activities to interact with the environment.Recent advancements in technology and machine learning algorithms have increased interest in electroencephalographic (EEG)-based BCI applications.EEG-based intelligent BCI systems can facilitate continuous monitoring of fluctuations in human cognitive states under monotonous tasks, which is both beneficial for people in need of healthcare support and general researchers in different domain areas.In this review, we survey the recent literature on EEG signal sensing technologies and computational intelligence approaches in BCI applications, compensating for the gaps in the systematic summary of the past five years.Specifically, we first review the current status of BCI and signal sensing technologies for collecting reliable EEG signals.Then, we demonstrate state-of-the-art computational intelligence techniques, including fuzzy models and transfer learning in machine learning and deep learning algorithms, to detect, monitor, and maintain human cognitive states and task performance in prevalent applications.Finally, we present a couple of innovative BCI-inspired healthcare applications and discuss future research directions in EEG-based BCI research.!

A principled approach to modeling sociocognitive networks is fundamental to understanding the network interrelations which in turn can be used in many applications such as human behavior analysis or team performance assessment. More specifically, in the opinion domain, learning the cognitive links and making a proper model for causal relationships between individuals is necessary for both analysis and control purposes. There are several mathematical models for opinion dynamics. However, few of them have been tested to be consistent with real-world data. In this article, a new hybrid model for opinion dynamics is proposed and is put to test with subjective experiments. It is imperative that a realistic model considers two cognitive facts: 1) a person tends to stick to his/her previously shaped opinion and 2) the opinion of a person is affected by others (either reinforced in a positive way or undermined negatively). This article presents a novel mathematical formulation of the proposed opinion dynamics model and proves its stability too. The new model is also extended to support multiple dimensions. In the multidimensional approach, opinions about two or more subjects are considered separately. The rationale behind this is to describe the evolution of agents’ opinions on several topics. To study how the model performs in reality, some real-world experiments are conducted and the influence matrix is learned in each case. In addition, a method is introduced to extract the parameters of the model from the experimental data. It is shown that the new model predictions, after it is trained, chase the real behaviors of participants very well and result in less error compared with the previous models.

Multimodal representation learning is beneficial for many multimedia-oriented applications, such as social image recognition and visual question answering. The different modalities of the same instance (e.g., a social image and its corresponding description) are usually correlational and complementary. Most existing approaches for multimodal representation learning are not effective to model the deep correlation between different modalities. Moreover, it is difficult for these approaches to deal with the noise within social images. In this article, we propose a deep learning-based approach named evolutionary adversarial attention networks (EAANs), which combines the attention mechanism with adversarial networks through evolutionary training, for robust multimodal representation learning. Specifically, a two-branch visual-textual attention model is proposed to correlate visual and textual content for joint representation. Then adversarial networks are employed to impose regularization upon the representation by matching its posterior distribution to the given priors. Finally, the attention model and adversarial networks are integrated into an evolutionary training framework for robust multimodal representation learning. Extensive experiments have been conducted on four real-world datasets, including PASCAL, MIR, CLEF, and NUS-WIDE. Substantial performance improvements on the tasks of image classification and tag recommendation demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach.

Nowadays, rumor spreading has gradually evolved into a kind of organized behaviors, accompanied with strong uncertainty and fuzziness. However, existing fuzzy detection techniques for rumors focused their attention on supervised scenarios that require expert samples with labels for training. Thus, they are not able to well handle the unsupervised scenarios where labels are unavailable. To bridge such gap, this article proposed a fuzzy detection system for rumors through explainable adaptive learning. Specifically, its core is a graph embedding-based generative adversarial network (Graph-GAN) model. First of all, it constructs fine-grained feature spaces via graph-level encoding. Furthermore, it introduces continuous adversarial training between a generator and a discriminator for unsupervised decoding. The two-stage scheme not only solves the fuzzy rumor detection under unsupervised scenarios, but also improves robustness of the unsupervised training. Empirically, a set of experiments are carried out based on three real-world datasets. Compared with seven benchmark methods in terms of four metrics, the results of the Graph-GAN reveal a proper performance, which averagely exceeds baselines by 5–10%.

Dempster-Shafer evidence (DSE) theory, which allows combining pieces of evidence from different data sources to derive a degree of belief function that is a type of fuzzy measure, is a general framework for reasoning with uncertainty. In this framework, how to optimally manage the conflicts of multiple pieces of evidence in DSE remains an open issue to support decision making. The existing conflict measurement approaches can achieve acceptable outcomes but do not fully consider the optimization at the decision-making level using the novel measurement of conflicts. In this article, we propose a novel evidential correlation coefficient (ECC) for belief functions by measuring the conflict between two pieces of evidence in decision making. Then, we investigate the properties of our proposed evidential correlation and conflict coefficients, which are all proven to satisfy the desirable properties for conflict measurement, including nonnegativity, symmetry, boundedness, extreme consistency, and insensitivity to refinement. We also present several examples and comparisons to demonstrate the superiority of our proposed ECC method. Finally, we apply the proposed ECC in a decision-making application of motor rotor fault diagnosis, which verifies the practicability and effectiveness of our proposed novel measurement.

To improve the quality of service (QoS) needed by several applications areas, the Internet of Things (IoT) tasks are offloaded into the fog computing instead of the cloud. However, the availability of ongoing energy heads for fog computing servers is one of the constraints for IoT applications because transmitting the huge quantity of the data generated using IoT devices will produce network bandwidth overhead and slow down the responsive time of the statements analyzed. In this article, an energy-aware model basis on the marine predators algorithm (MPA) is proposed for tackling the task scheduling in fog computing (TSFC) to improve the QoSs required by users. In addition to the standard MPA, we proposed the other two versions. The first version is called modified MPA (MMPA), which will modify MPA to improve their exploitation capability by using the last updated positions instead of the last best one. The second one will improve MMPA by the ranking strategy based reinitialization and mutation toward the best, in addition to reinitializing, the half population randomly after a predefined number of iterations to get rid of local optima and mutated the last half toward the best-so-far solution. Accordingly, MPA is proposed to solve the continuous one, whereas the TSFC is considered a discrete one, so the normalization and scaling phase will be used to convert the standard MPA into a discrete one. The three versions are proposed with some other metaheuristic algorithms and genetic algorithms based on various performance metrics such as energy consumption, makespan, flow time, and carbon dioxide emission rate. The improved MMPA could outperform all the other algorithms and the other two versions.

Internet of Things is making objects smarter and more autonomous. At the other side, online education is gaining momentum and many universities are now offering online degrees. Content preparation for such programs usually involves recording the classes. In this article, we intend to introduce a deep learning-based camera management system as a substitute for the academic filming crew. The solution mainly consists of two cameras and a wearable gadget for the instructor. The fixed camera is used for the instructor's position and pose detection and the pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) camera does the filming. In the proposed solution, image processing and deep learning techniques are merged together. Face recognition and skeleton detection algorithms are used to detect the position of instructor. But the main contribution lies in the application of deep learning for instructor's skeleton detection and postprocessing of the deep network output for correction of the pose detection results using a Bayesian Maximum A Posteriori (MAP) estimator. This estimator is defined on a Markov state machine. The pose detection result along with the position info is then used by the PTZ camera controller for filming purposes. The proposed solution is implemented by using OpenPose which is a convolutional neural network for detection of body parts. Feeding a neural network pose classifier with 12 features extracted from the output of the deep network yields an accuracy of 89%. However, as we show, the accuracy can be improved by the Markov model and MAP estimator to reach as high as 95.5%.

The papers in this special section focus on configuration security for industrial automation and control systems. These systems include supervisory control and data acquisition systems, distributed control systems, and other control system configurations such as programmable logic controllers, which are typically used in industries such as electric, water and wastewater, oil and natural gas, transportation, chemical, pharmaceutical, food and beverage, and discrete manufacturing, examples of which are automotive, aerospace, and durable goods. These systems are highly interconnected and mutually dependent in complex ways, both physically and through information and communications technologies, and they support a diverse set of services for the management of critical infrastructure by making use of a wide variety of Internet of Things (IoT) devices for sensing and actuation. These papers highlight the main research challenges and solutions for improving configuration security in the context of industrial automation and control systems by taking into consideration various challenges faced by industrial applications.

Three-dimensional display and virtual reality technology have been applied in minimally invasive surgery to provide doctors with a more immersive surgical experience. One of the most popular systems based on this technology is the Da Vinci surgical robot system. The key to build the in vivo 3-D virtual reality model with a monocular endoscope is an accurate estimation of depth and motion. In this article, a fully unsupervised learning method for depth and motion estimation using the continuous monocular endoscopic video is proposed. After the detection of highlighted regions, EndoMotionNet and EndoDepthNet are designed to estimate ego-motion and depth, respectively. The timing information between consecutive frames is considered with a long short-term memory layer by EndoMotionNet to enhance the accuracy of ego-motion estimation. The estimated depth value of the previous frame is used to estimate the depth of the next frame by EndoDepthNet with a multimode fusion mechanism. The custom loss function is defined to improve the robustness and accuracy of the proposed unsupervised-learning-based method. Experiments with the public datasets verify that the proposed unsupervised-learning-based continuous depth and motion estimation method can effectively improve the accuracy of depth and motion estimation, especially after processing the frame.

Opinion dynamics modeling has long been interesting to scientists because of its applications in the marketing industry as well as elections. Agreement, e.g., on a special product, has an affective influence on its manufacturing process. However, most of the existing opinion dynamics models are linear time invariant. In this article, eight non-linear time variant models for opinion dynamics are proposed and put to test on subjective synthetic networks. Despite all the efforts, the issues of stability and convergence in time-varying networks, which can be found in industrial contexts, have not been resolved yet and only sufficient conditions have been derived. In the proposed models, unlike in the classical ones such as the French-DeGroot model, we have taken into account each member's susceptibility to persuasion by others that is a cognitive parametric function of individuals' opinions. In addition, we have introduced a stubbornness matrix which has large values initially but shrinks to zero as the time grows. This implies that agents' susceptibilities to others, at the beginning of any experiment, are smaller than what they are at the end. We present a novel mathematical formulation for these new opinion dynamics models and prove their stability too. For evaluation, we simulated a scenario in which some people connected via a graph, voted for a product. They initially had their own stands but gradually came to a point found through interaction with the others. The results confirm the convergence and stability of the proposed models.

In this article, we propose a prekeying-based integrity protection mechanism for critical smart grid communications that are often left unprotected due to tight timing constraints. Our mechanism computes the key for the next message in advance followed by a simple exclusive-or operation with the message when it is generated. This provides both integrity and confidentiality at a very low latency cost. The rigorous security analysis shows that the proposed method is secure against cyclic redundancy check (CRC) and message replay attacks. The extensive evaluation shows that the method is up to 21 times faster than standard integrity protection algorithms, and can do the message encryption in under 1 ms even on a very low-end microcontroller.

As major infrastructures are increasingly depending on electricity, the smart grid has become an important base for industrial manufacturing and residential living. Despite the benefits of smart grids, the reliability and continuity of power services are often threatened by severe nature disasters and human errors. In smart grids, the centralized and often large-sized grid equipment hinder the rapid recovery and flexible reconfiguration in an emergency. Meanwhile, the large amount of personal equipment and their invisibility make it difficult for the grid operators to utilize assets optimally and easily. In addition, since the power service is provided by multiple energy functions, which consists voltage transformation, transmission, and storage, only considering the restoration of power generation function will restrict the service capacity and lengthen the response time. To address these problems, this article proposes an energy function virtualization for smart grid to decouple the implementation of energy functions from the underlying physical infrastructure to speed up the deployment and test of energy functions. With the help of distributed infrastructure resources, manager can redeploy energy functions and accelerate the service response in smart grid. To motivate prosumers to contribute private function resources, an optimized network calculus performance assessment scheme and a game theory-based resource orchestration scheme are proposed. Simulation results show that proposed scheme can dynamically adjust the delay factor to shorten the emergency response time.

With the benefits of Internet of Vehicles (IoV) paradigm, come along unprecedented security challenges. Among many applications of inter-connected systems, vehicular networks and smart cars are examples that are already rolled out. Smart vehicles not only have networks connecting their internal components e.g. via Controller Area Network (CAN) bus, but also are connected to the outside world through road side units and other vehicles. In some cases, the internal and external network packets pass through the same hardware and are merely isolated by software defined rules. Any misconfiguration opens a window for the hackers to intrude into vehicles' internal components e.g. central lock system, Engine Control Unit (ECU), Anti-lock Braking System (ABS) or Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) system. Compromise of any of these can lead to disastrous outcomes. In this paper, we study the security of smart vehicles' adaptive cruise control systems in the presence of covert attacks. We define two covert/stealth attacks in the context of cruise control and propose a novel intrusion detection and compensation method to disclose and respond to such attacks. More precisely, we focus on the covert cyber attacks that compromise the integrity of cruise controller and employ a neural network identifier in the IDS engine to estimate the system output dynamically and compare it against the ACC output. If any anomaly is detected, an embedded substitute controller kicks in and takes over the control. We conducted extensive experiments in MATLAB to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in a simulated environment.

Today's vehicles are advancing from stand-alone transportation means to vehicle-to-vehicle, and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications enabled devices which are able to exchange data through the transportation communication infrastructure. As the IoT and data remain intrinsically linked together, the fast-changing mobility landscape of intent-based networking for the Internet of connected vehicles comes with a great risk of data security and privacy violations. This paper considers the privacy issues in the distributed edge computing, in which the data is communicated between a number of vehicles in the IoT layer and potentially untrusted edge controllers at the edge of the network. The sensory data communicated by the vehicles contain sensitive information, such as location and speed, which could violate the users' privacy if they are leaked with no perturbation. Recent studies suggest mechanisms for randomizing the stream of data to ensure individuals' privacy. Although the past works on differential privacy provide a strong privacy guarantee, they are limited to applications where communication parties are trusted and/or there is no correlation between the users or the featured of sensory data. In this paper, we address this gap by proposing a differentially private data streaming system that adds a correlated noise in the vehicle's side (IoT layer) rather than the transportation infrastructure. Also, our system is able to ensure a strong privacy level over time. The proposed mechanism is data-adaptive and scales the noise with respect to the data correlation. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that the utility of the output generated by our method outperforms the recent approaches.

The autonomous vehicular technology is approaching a level of maturity that gives confidence to end-users in many cities around the world for their usage so as to share the roads with manual vehicles. Autonomous and manual vehicles have different capabilities which may result in surprising safety, security, and resilience impacts when mixed together as a part of the intelligent transportation system (ITS). For example, autonomous vehicles can communicate electronically with one another, make fast decisions and associated actuation, and generally act deterministically. In contrast, manual vehicles cannot communicate electronically, are limited by the capabilities and slow reaction of human drivers, and may show some uncertainty and even irrationality in behavior due to the involvement of humans. At the same time, humans can react properly to more complex situations than autonomous vehicles. Unlike manual vehicles, the security of computing and communications of autonomous vehicles can be compromised thereby precluding them from achieving individual or group goals.

The development of vehicular Internet of Things (IoT) applications, such as E-Transport, Augmented Reality, and Virtual Reality are growing progressively. The mobility aware services and network-based security are fundamental requirements of these applications. However, multi-side offloading enabling blockchain and cost-efficient scheduling in heterogeneous vehicular fog cloud nodes network become a challenging task. The study formulates this problem as a convex optimization problem, where all constraints are the convex set. The goal of the study is to minimize communication cost and computation cost of applications under mobility, security, deadline, and resource constraints. Initially, we propose a novel vehicular fog cloud network (VFCN) which consists of different components and heterogeneous computing nodes. The ensure mobility privacy, the study devises Mobility Aware Blockchain-Enabled offloading scheme (MABOS). It extends blockchain enable multi-side offloading (e.g., offline offloading and online offloading) with proof of work (PoW), proof of creditability (PoC) and fault-tolerant techniques. The purpose is to offload all tasks under the secure network without any violation. Furthermore, to ensure Quality of Service (QoS) of applications, this work suggests linear search based task scheduling (LSBTS) method, which maps all tasks onto appropriate computing nodes. The experimental results show that devise schemes outperform all existing baseline approaches to the considered problem.

As the increasing availability and use of dynamic mobile communications, information from an Internet of Things (IoT) subset of devices, known as Internet of Connected Vehicles (IoCV), is collected with a level of uncertainty. To bridge this gap of data analytics, some studies take two factors individually to mine knowledge or information, such as uncertainty and utility as two exemplary factors. However, this approach may cause actual loss of knowledge integrity. In this work, our first result is a knowledge called High Expected Utility Sequential Patterns (HEUSPs) that is both novel and also provides an alternative option for knowledge discovery regarding utility and uncertainty factors by a single threshold in IoCV environments. Furthermore, two PUL-Chain and EUL-Chain structures with six pruning methodologies are respectively developed to maintain information that is necessary and reduce the search space for improving mining performance. Our experimental results show both efficiency and strength of the designed algorithm compared to HUS-Span which is considered to be the current standard in utility-oriented sequential pattern mining.

Roadside cameras in an Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) are used for various purposes, e.g., monitoring the speed of vehicles, violations of laws, and detection of suspicious activities in parking lots, streets, and side roads. These cameras generate big multimedia data, and as a result, the ITS faces challenges like data management, redundancy, and privacy breaching in end-to-end communication. To solve these challenges, we propose a framework, called SPEED, based on a multi-level edge computing architecture and machine learning algorithms. In this framework, data captured by end-devices, e.g., smart cameras, is distributed among multiple Level-One Edge Devices (LOEDs) to deal with data management issue and minimize packet drop due to buffer overflowing on end-devices and LOEDs. The data is forwarded from LOEDs to Level-Two Edge Devices (LTEDs) in a compressed sensed format. The LTEDs use an online Least-Squares Support-Vector Machines (LS-SVMs) model to determine distribution characteristics and index values of compressed sensed data to preserve its privacy during transmission between LTEDs and High-Level Edge Devices (HLEDs). The HLEDs estimate the redundancy in forwarded data using a deep learning architecture, i.e., a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). The CNN is used to detect the presence of moving objects in the forwarded data. If a movement is detected, the data is forwarded to cloud servers for further analysis otherwise discarded. Experimental results show that the use of a multi-level edge computing architecture helps in managing the generated data. The machine learning algorithms help in addressing issues like data redundancy and privacy-preserving in end-to-end communication.

Technology advances—such as improving processing power, battery life, and communication functionalities—contribute to making mobile devices an attractive research area. In 2008, in order to manage mobility, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) developed Proxy Mobile IPv6, which is a network-based mobility management protocol to support seamless connectivity of mobile devices. This protocol can play a key role in volunteer computing paradigms as a user can seamlessly access computing resources. The procedure of user authentication is not defined in this standard; thus, many studies have been carried out to propose suitable authentication schemes. However, in the current authentication methods, with reduced latency and packet loss, some security and privacy considerations are neglected. In this study, we propose a secure and anonymous ticket-based authentication (SATA) method to protect mobile nodes against existing security and privacy issues. The proposed method reduces the overhead of handover authentication procedures using the ticket-based concept. We evaluated security and privacy strengths of the proposed method using security theorems and BAN logic.

Many Internet of Things applications in smart cities use elliptic-curve cryptosystems due to their efficiency compared to other well-known public-key cryptosystems such as RSA. One of the important components of an elliptic-curve-based cryptosystem is the elliptic-curve point multiplication which has been shown to be vulnerable to various types of side-channel attacks. Recently, substantial progress has been made in applying deep learning to side-channel attacks. Conceptually, the idea is to monitor a core while it is running encryption for information leakage of a certain kind, for example, power consumption. The knowledge of the underlying encryption algorithm can be used to train a model to recognise the key used for encryption. The model is then applied to traces gathered from the crypto core in order to recover the encryption key. In this article, we propose an RNS GLV elliptic curve cryptography core which is immune to machine learning and deep learning based side-channel attacks. The experimental analysis confirms the proposed crypto core does not leak any information about the private key and therefore it is suitable for hardware implementations.

Recently, due to the increase in popularity of the Internet, the problem of digital data security over the Internet is increasing at a phenomenal rate. Watermarking is used for various notable applications to secure digital data from unauthorized individuals. To achieve this, in this article, we propose a joint encryption then-compression based watermarking technique for digital document security. This technique offers a tool for confidentiality, copyright protection, and strong compression performance of the system. The proposed method involves three major steps as follows: (1) embedding of multiple watermarks through non-sub-sampled contourlet transform, redundant discrete wavelet transform, and singular value decomposition; (2) encryption and compression via SHA-256 and Lempel Ziv Welch (LZW), respectively; and (3) extraction/recovery of multiple watermarks from the possibly distorted cover image. The performance estimations are carried out on various images at different attacks, and the efficiency of the system is determined in terms of peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and normalized correlation (NC), structural similarity index measure (SSIM), number of changing pixel rate (NPCR), unified averaged changed intensity (UACI), and compression ratio (CR). Furthermore, the comparative analysis of the proposed system with similar schemes indicates its superiority to them.

Fingerprint provides an extremely convenient way of identification for a wide range of real-life applications owing to its universality, uniqueness, collectability, and invariance. However, digitized fingerprints may reveal the privacy of individuals. Differential privacy is a promising privacy-preserving solution that is enforced by injecting random noise into preserved objects, such that an adversary with arbitrary background knowledge cannot infer private input from the noisy results. This study proposes FinPrivacy, a privacy-preserving mechanism for fingerprint identification. This mechanism utilizes the low-rank matrix approximation to reduce the dimensionality of fingerprint and the exponential mechanism to carefully determine the value of the optimal rank. Thereafter, FinPrivacy injects Laplace noise to the singular values of the approximated singular matrix, thereby trading off between privacy and utility. Analytic proofs and results of the comparative experiments demonstrate that FinPrivacy can simultaneously enforce ɛ-differential privacy and maintain an efficient fingerprint recognition.

Time-series medical images are an important type of medical data that contain rich temporal and spatial information. As a state-of-the-art, computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) algorithms are usually used on these image sequences to improve analysis accuracy. However, such CAD algorithms are often required to upload medical images to honest-but-curious servers, which introduces severe privacy concerns. To preserve privacy, the existing CAD algorithms support analysis on each encrypted image but not on the whole encrypted image sequences, which leads to the loss of important temporal information among frames. To meet this challenge, a convolutional-LSTM network, named HE-CLSTM, is proposed for analyzing time-series medical images encrypted by a fully homomorphic encryption mechanism. Specifically, several convolutional blocks are constructed to extract discriminative spatial features, and LSTM-based sequence analysis layers (HE-LSTM) are leveraged to encode temporal information from the encrypted image sequences. Moreover, a weighted unit and a sequence voting layer are designed to incorporate both spatial and temporal features with different weights to improve performance while reducing the missed diagnosis rate. The experimental results on two challenging benchmarks (a Cervigram dataset and the BreaKHis public dataset) provide strong evidence that our framework can encode visual representations and sequential dynamics from encrypted medical image sequences; our method achieved AUCs above 0.94 both on the Cervigram and BreaKHis datasets, constituting a significant margin of statistical improvement compared with several competing methods.

With the rapid development of various computing technologies, the constraints of data processing capabilities gradually disappeared, and more data can be simultaneously processed to obtain better performance compared to conventional methods. As a standard statistical analysis method that has been widely used in many fields, Independent Component Analysis (ICA) provides a new way for motion detection by extracting the foreground without precisely modeling the background. However, most existing ICA-based motion detection algorithms use only two-channel data for source separation and simply generate the observation vectors by decomposing and reconstructing the images by row, hence they cannot obtain an integrated and accurate shape of the moving objects in complex scenes. In this article, we propose a refined ICA algorithm for motion detection (RICA-MD), which fuses a larger number of channels than conventional ICA-based motion detection algorithms to provide more effective information for foreground extraction. Meanwhile, we propose four novel methods for generating observation vectors to further cover the diverse motion styles of the moving objects. These improvements enable RICA-MD to effectively deal with slowly moving objects, which are difficult to detect using conventional methods. Our quantitative evaluation in multiple scenes shows that our proposed method is able to achieve a better performance at an acceptable cost of false alarms.

Fuzzy systems can aid in diminishing uncertainty and noise from biometric security applications by providing an intelligent layer to the existing physical systems to make them reliable. In the absence of such fuzzy systems, a little random perturbation in captured human biometrics could disrupt the whole security system, which may even decline the authentication requests of legitimate entities during the protocol execution. In the literature, few fuzzy logic-based biometric authentication schemes have been presented; however, they lack significant security features including perfect forward secrecy (PFS), untraceability, and resistance to known attacks. This article, therefore, proposes a novel two-factor biometric authentication protocol enabling efficient and secure combination of physically unclonable functions, a physical object analogous to human fingerprint, with user biometrics by employing fuzzy extractor-based procedures in the loop. This combination enables the participants in the protocol to achieve PFS. The security of the proposed scheme is tested using the well-known real-or-random model. The performance analysis signifies the fact that the proposed scheme not only offers PFS, untraceability, and anonymity to the participants, but is also resilient to known attacks using light-weight symmetric operations, which makes it an imperative advancement in the category of intelligent and reliable security solutions.

Trust can be employed for finding reliable information in Online Social Networks (OSNs). Since users in OSNs may intentionally change their behavior over time (in some cases for deceiving other users), modeling (pair-wise) trust relations in such complex environment is a challenging task. However, most of the existing trust prediction approaches assume that trust relations are fixed over time and they fail to capture the dynamic behavior of users in OSNs. In this paper, we propose a dynamic deep trust prediction model. As the impact of incidental emotions on trust has been proven in psychology studies, in this paper, we also study this impact on our trust prediction approach. First, we propose a novel deep structure that incorporates users' emotions and their textual contents in OSNs. Second, we use embeddings to represent the users and their self-descriptions provided. Finally, considering different time windows, we dynamically predict pair-wise trust relations. To evaluate our approach, we collected a large twitter dataset. The evaluation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach compared to the state-of-the-art approaches.

The exponential growth of smartphones and other smart communicating devices has led to the proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Literature shows, one person will have more than six intelligent connected devices in future. The existing network infrastructure and bandwidth will be unable to accommodate the growing number of smart connected devices, therefore, achieving the expected Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE) remains a challenge. The advent and deployment of 5G network bring a massive number of innovative network services and exceptional user experience by providing superior data rates. Despite numerous benefits that 5G offers, the security and privacy in 5G is a challenge due to the existing large number of heterogeneous networks (HetNet). To harvest the numerous benefits of 5G, it is imperative to provide adequate protection mechanisms to maintain the user and data privacy in growing HetNet. This article comprehensively addresses the existing security issues in 5G HetNet and solutions for the identified problems in the HetNet edge.

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.

Advanced driver-assistance systems (ADASs) have been proposed as an alternative to driverless vehicles to provide support for automotive vehicle decisions. As a significant driving force for ADASs, the augmented reality (AR) provides comprehensive location-based content services for in-vehicle consumers. With the increase in request for information sharing, the current standalone mode of ADASs needs a shift to the multiuser sharing mode. In this article, to address the high mobility and real time requirements of ADASs in 5G environments, and also to address the resource orchestration and service management of big data in intelligent transportation systems, we integrate the information-centric network (ICN) and the network function virtualization (NFV) with ADASs to support an efficient AR-assisted content sharing and distribution. This integration eliminates the imbalance between the content requests and the resource limitation by splitting the virtual resources and providing an on-demand network and resource slicing in ADASs. We propose an incentive trading model for assistance content caching services and also propose a novel mechanism for optimal content cache allocation. Our extensive evaluation confirms that our proposed mechanism outperforms the past literature in terms of the cache hit ratio and latency.

Edge computing provides a promising paradigm to support the implementation of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) by offloading computational-intensive tasks from resource-limited machine-type devices (MTDs) to powerful edge servers. However, the performance gain of edge computing may be severely compromised due to limited spectrum resources, capacity-constrained batteries, and context unawareness. In this article, we consider the optimization of channel selection that is critical for efficient and reliable task delivery. We aim at maximizing the long-term throughput subject to long-term constraints of energy budget and service reliability. We propose a learning-based channel selection framework with service reliability awareness, energy awareness, backlog awareness, and conflict awareness, by leveraging the combined power of machine learning, Lyapunov optimization, and matching theory. We provide rigorous theoretical analysis, and prove that the proposed framework can achieve guaranteed performance with a bounded deviation from the optimal performance with global state information (GSI) based on only local and causal information. Finally, simulations are conducted under both single-MTD and multi-MTD scenarios to verify the effectiveness and reliability of the proposed framework.

In this article, we consider a software-defined wireless sensor network (WSN) architecture which conserves energy by applying asynchronous duty cycling. In asynchronous sensor networks, the overhearing adversely impacts the energy consumption of the nodes. Using a mathematical model, we compute the maximum lifetime of the network and accordingly propose a multichannel operation and transmit power control to reduce the effect of overhearing in asynchronous networks. Our comprehensive test results confirm that for the network with load-aware nonuniform sensor node deployment, the network lifetime is much higher compared to a uniform deployment. We also show that the use of data aggregation software-defined WSNs (SDWSNs) can improve the network lifetime as compared to the data gathering networks.

In today's technology, a sheer number of Internet of Things applications use hardware security modules for secure communications. The widely used algorithms in security modules, for example, digital signatures and key agreement, are based upon elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). A core operation used in ECC is the point multiplication, which is computationally expensive for many Internet of things applications. In many IoT applications, such as intelligent transportation systems and distributed control systems, thousands of safety messages need to be signed and verified within a very short time-frame. Considerable research has been conducted in the design of a fast elliptic curve arithmetic on finite fields using residue number systems (RNS). In this article, we propose an RNS-based ECC core hardware for the two families of elliptic curves that are short Weierstrass and twisted Edwards curves. Specifically, we present RNS implementations for SECP256K1 and ED25519 standard curves. We propose an RNS hardware architecture supporting fast elliptic curve point-addition (ECPA), point-doubling (ECPD), and point-tripling (ECPT). We implemented different ECC point multiplication algorithms on the Xilinx FPGA platform. The test results confirm that the performance of our fully RNS ECC point multiplication is better than the fastest ECC point multiplication cores in the literature.

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.

Industrial Internet of Things applications demand trustworthiness in terms of quality of service (QoS), security, and privacy, to support the smooth transmission of data. To address these challenges, in this article, we propose a distributed and anonymous data collection (DaaC) framework based on a multilevel edge computing architecture. This framework distributes captured data among multiple level-one edge devices (LOEDs) to improve the QoS and minimize packet drop and end-to-end delay. Mobile sinks are used to collect data from LOEDs and upload to cloud servers. Before data collection, the mobile sinks are registered with a level-two edge-device to protect the underlying network. The privacy of mobile sinks is preserved through group-based signed data collection requests. Experimental results show that our proposed framework improves QoS through distributed data transmission. It also helps in protecting the underlying network through a registration scheme and preserves the privacy of mobile sinks through group-based data collection requests.

In virtue of advances in smart networks and the cloud computing paradigm, smart healthcare is transforming. However, there are still challenges, such as storing sensitive data in untrusted and controlled infrastructure and ensuring the secure transmission of medical data, among others. The rapid development of watermarking provides opportunities for smart healthcare. In this article, we propose a new data-sharing framework and a data access control mechanism. The applications are submitted by the doctors, and the data is processed in the medical data center of the hospital, stored in semi-trusted servers to support the selective sharing of electronic medical records from different medical institutions between different doctors. Our approach ensures that privacy concerns are taken into account when processing requests for access to patients’ medical information. For accountability, after data is modified or leaked, both patients and doctors must add digital watermarks associated with their identification when uploading data. Extensive analytical and experimental results are presented that show the security and efficiency of our proposed scheme.

The Internet of Multimedia Things (IoMT) has become the backbone of innumerable multimedia applications in various fields. The wide application of IoMT not only makes our life convenient but also brings challenges to service discovery. Service discovery aims to leverage location information and trust evidence scattered in a variety of multimedia applications to find trusted IoMT devices that can provide specific service in target areas. However, the eavesdropping and tampering to these sensitive IoMT data during the trust propagation process invalidate the service discovery process. To address these challenges, we propose Secure Service Discovery (SSD) for IoMT using cross-blockchain-enabled fog computing. To resist the tampering and eavesdropping during the trust propagation process, a scalable cross-blockchain structure consisting of multiple parallel blockchains is first proposed based on fog, in which different parallel blockchains can be orchestrated to propagate encrypted location information and trust evidence of different applications. Moreover, to enable a cross-blockchain structure to leverage encrypted location information and trust evidence to find trusted IoMT devices in preset areas, a novel privacy-preserving range query is proposed to query and aggregate trust evidence. Security analysis and simulations are carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness and security of the proposed SSD.

Data transmission in delay tolerant networks (DTNs) is a challenging problem due to the lack of continuous network connectivity and nondeterministic mobility of the nodes. Epidemic routing and spray-and-wait methods are two popular mechanisms that are proposed for DTNs. In order to reduce the transmission delay in DTNs, some previous works combine intra-flow network coding with the routing protocols. In this paper, we propose two routing mechanisms using systematic joint inter- and intra-flow network coding for the purpose of data exchange between the nodes. We discuss the reasons why inter-flow network coding helps to reduce the delivery delay of the packets, and we also analyze the delays related with only using intra-flow coding, and joint inter- and intra-flow coding methods. We empirically show the benefit of joint coding over just intra-flow coding. Based on our simulation, joint coding can reduce the delay up to 40%, compared to only intra-flow coding.

Due to the mission-critical nature of energy management, smart power grids are prime targets for cyber-attacks. A key security objective in the smart grid is to protect the integrity of synchronized real-time measurements taken by phasor measurement units (PMUs). The current communication protocol in substation automation allows the transmission of PMU data in absence of integrity protection for applications that strictly require low communication latency. This leaves the PMU data vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks. In this paper, a lightweight and secure integrity protection algorithm has been proposed to maintain the integrity of PMU data, which fills the missing integrity protection in the IEC 61850-90-5 standard, when the MAC identifier is declared 0. The rigorous security analysis proves the security of the proposed integrity protection method against ciphertext-only attacks and known/chosen plaintext attacks. A comparison with existing integrity protection methods shows that our method is much faster, and is also the only integrity protection scheme that meets the strict timing requirement. Not only the proposed method can be used in power protection applications, but it also can be used in emerging anomaly detection scenarios, where a fast integrity check coupled with low latency communications is used for multiple rounds of message exchanges.

Permutation is a commonly used primitive in multimedia (image/video) encryption schemes, and many permutation-only algorithms have been proposed in recent years for the protection of multimedia data. In permutation-only image ciphers, the entries of the image matrix are scrambled using a permutation mapping matrix which is built by a pseudo-random number generator. The literature on the cryptanalysis of image ciphers indicates that the permutation-only image ciphers are insecure against ciphertext-only attacks and/or known/chosenplaintext attacks. However, the previous studies have not been able to ensure the correct retrieval of the complete plaintext elements. In this paper, we revisited the previous works on cryptanalysis of permutation-only image encryption schemes and made the cryptanalysis work on chosen-plaintext attacks complete and more efficient. We proved that in all permutationonly image ciphers, regardless of the cipher structure, the correct permutation mapping is recovered completely by a chosenplaintext attack. To the best of our knowledge, for the first time, this paper gives a chosen-plaintext attack that completely determines the correct plaintext elements using a deterministic method. When the plain-images are of size M × N and with L different color intensities, the number n of required chosen plain-images to break the permutation-only image encryption algorithm is n = ΓlogL(MN)1. The complexity of the proposed attack is O (n · M N) which indicates its feasibility in a polynomial amount of computation time. To validate the performance of the proposed chosen-plaintext attack, numerous experiments were performed on two recently proposed permutation-only image/video ciphers. Both theoretical and experimental results showed that the proposed attack outperforms the state-of-theart cryptanalytic methods.

Due to widespread applications of 3D vision technology, the research into 3D object protection is primarily important. To maintain confidentiality, encryption of 3D objects is essential. However, the requirements and limitations imposed by 3D objects indicate the impropriety of conventional cryptosystems for 3D object encryption. This suggests the necessity of designing new ciphers. In addition, the study of prior works indicates that the majority of problems encountered with encrypting 3D objects are about point cloud protection, dimensional and spatial stability, and robustness against surface reconstruction attacks. To address these problems, this paper proposes a 3D object encryption scheme, based on a series of random permutations and rotations, which deform the geometry of the point cloud. Since the inverse of a permutation and a rotation matrix is its transpose, the decryption implementation is very efficient. Our statistical analyses show that within the cipher point cloud, points are randomly distributed. Furthermore, the proposed cipher leaks no information regarding the geometric structure of the plain point cloud, and is also highly sensitive to the changes of the plaintext and secret key. The theoretical and experimental analyses demonstrate the security, effectiveness, and robustness of the proposed cipher against surface reconstruction attacks.