Abstract Securing digital images captured by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is important for maintaining data confidentiality and integrity during transmission over insecure networks. This study surveys and evaluates existing encryption schemes such as Arnold transformation, chaos-based, bit-plane extraction, quantum, and permutation-based algorithms. The existing image encryption algorithms are implemented and tested in MATLAB 2015 using standard benchmark images (Quantum, Baboon, and Cameraman), selected for their frequent use and benchmark relevance in recent image security literature. For algorithms whose statistical indices are already documented in prior research, those published values are adopted for reference. In cases where such data were unavailable, the corresponding schemes were re-implemented and experimentally evaluated in MATLAB 2015 to produce consistent and reproducible performance results. The comparative statistical analysis across these datasets demonstrates that hybrid quantum–chaotic and permutation–diffusion methods achieve near-ideal entropy values ( $$\approx $$ 7.999), high NPCR ( $$\approx $$ 99.6%), and UACI ( $$\approx $$ 33.4%). This indicates strong resistance to statistical and differential attacks. These schemes also exhibit low correlation coefficients (< 0.002) and large key spaces (> $$2^{100}$$ ).

The fog-based IoT (IoT-Fog) network, which combines Internet of Things (IoTs) and fog computing, has quickly become a key enabler of emerging applications such as smart transportation, smart homes, and smart grids. It has, however, introduced an IoT device cloning attack, which allows adversaries to mount a range of attacks on IoT networks. IoT devices have a built-in security system, making them an easy target for hackers. Therefore, it is critical to reliably identify and isolate cloned IoT devices to protect IoT networks from adversaries taking control of the network. Existing approaches do not address the problems of compromised device and repeated cloned device simultaneously without requiring the device’s exact locations. To this end, we propose a new low complexity IoT device cloning detection approach called Maximum Distance Separable (MDS) which is appropriate for IoT-Fog architecture. We validated the efficiency of MDS analytically and evaluated its performance by comparing it to state-of-the-art approaches in terms of detection rate, communication overhead, memory overhead, and computation overhead. The results indicate that the proposed approach has a very high detection rate, negligible communication and memory overhead and promising detection time.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has advanced smart grid (SG) infrastructure by providing smart meters (SMs) with enhanced capabilities such as the ability to leverage the Internet platform for bidirectional information exchange. Cryptographic keys are necessary for securely exchanging sensitive information between SMs and energy providers. To manage these keys, a secure key management protocol (KMP) with little overhead and influence on the SG’s overall performance is necessary. Although various KMPs are available for IoT-enabled SG environments, exiting solutions have several flaws in terms of certificate revocation, security requirements, and overall SG performance. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a blockchain-based computationally-efficient and highly-secure KMP for IoT-enabled SG environments. We show that, compared to existing solutions, the proposed KMP has better SM side efficiency with improved security and more properties such as perfect forward secrecy, conditional anonymity, and simple SM revocation.

The smartphone-based sensors (including accelerometer, proximity, and gyroscope sensors) are ubiquitous and emerging mobility data sources that could be used for transportation modes (i.e. bus, train, car, walking, and stationary) detection. One of the important challenges in transportation modes detection is to build an appropriate model that can extract useful data from the sensor outputs and that can reduce misclassifications. Several factors make the feature modeling difficult including inappropriate sampling frequency of input signals, wavering behavior of devices (e.g. the changing orientation of a device relative to the human body), and continuous base vibration causing similar sensor outputs for both stationary and non-stationary states and related threshold values of velocity. This paper proposes novel approaches to address these challenges by developing a robust transportation mode detector based on a convolution neural network (CNN). The proposed robust detector develops a feature modeling technique by novel feature fusion and cloning techniques. Pre-trained features are constructed using a separate vanilla neural network (VNN) framework to extract the distinguishing components from the original features that are combined with the original and cloned features. The proposed feature fusion technique is successfully able to overcome the noise from the base vibration and the minimal informative outputs from the lower sampling frequency. This enables the CNN to be trained with more efficient and discriminative features that result in a better classification model. The proposed approaches have been validated using a large volume of mobile sensor data based on the movements of travelers. Different types of mobile sensors have been used to collect data including accelerometer, proximity, and gyroscope. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approaches can improve the performance of the detection engine significantly over conventional techniques and reduces the misclassification rate.

Rapid advancement of industrial internet of things (IoT) technology has changed the supply chain network to an open system to meet the high demand for individualized products and provide better customer experiences. However the open-system supply chain has forced many small and midsize enterprises (SMEs) to adopt vertical integration by being divided into smaller companies with a distinctive business for each SME but a central alliance to produce a range of products and gain competencies. Therefore, existing models do not guarantee the protection of data privacy of individual SMEs. Moreover, especially for the IoT environment, collecting data in a secure way and revealing valuable knowledge in an IoT network is difficult. How to share data in a secure framework is of paramount importance in the internet of behavior field. In this article, a privacy-preserving data-mining framework is proposed for joint-venture industrial collaborative activities by combining federated learning and a “pre-large concept” of data-mining techniques. The novelty of the proposed approach is that, while mining high-utility itemsets (HUIs) from multiple datasets, it does not require direct data sharing. In the proposed method, the federated-learning framework can learn from aggregated learning parameters without scanning all data from different sets. The pre-large concept in this approach reduces the amount of scanning into different datasets. Thus, the approach makes it possible to train federated learning more quickly while protecting the privacy of individual data owners. The approach has been tested on real industrial datasets in a collaborative environment. Extensive experimental results show that the approach achieves high accuracy compared with conventional data-mining techniques while preserving the privacy of datasets.

Critical infrastructures across many industries, such as smart water treatment and distribution networks (SWTDNs) and power generation and public transport networks, depend on the supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system. However, being the core component of the critical infrastructures, it has made the SCADA-based SWTDN system an attractive target for cyberattacks. A successful attack on the SCADA will have a devastating impact on an SWTDN in terms of proper operations; therefore, safeguarding the SCADA from cyberattacks is of paramount. With the increasing cyberattacks on SWTDN, both in number and sophistication, the need to detect these attacks early has become a subject of great interest among practitioners and researchers. To this end, we propose a novel strategy, based on a semisupervised approach. Two semisupervised approaches, including unsupervised learning and deep learning-based approaches, have been proposed. The proposed approaches can involve learning dynamic cyberattack patterns from unlabeled data in an SWTDN. We validate the proposed semisupervised approach experimentally using an operational water treatment plant testbed. The proposed approach achieved almost 100% accuracy and substantially outperforms the existing baseline approaches used in this article. The outcome of the experiment is encouraging and demonstrates the potential use of the semisupervised approach for security control in smart water distribution.

Cryptocurrencies are the new form of trade that has revolutionized how we look into our financial institutions. Bitcoin dominates the industry with the highest market share among the hundreds of other cryptocurrencies. However, high energy consumption leading to increasing carbon emission, prioritizing high-value transactions, and long waiting times are some of the flaws preventing it from reaching its full potential. Owing to the block rewards getting halved every four years, miners and researchers are fearful that this would be the breaking point of Bitcoin’s success. This article proposes an Industry-4.0-compliant next-generation Bitcoin architecture by introducing a dynamic and sustainable block concept. Along with our modified knapsack algorithms, i.e., priority-based 0/1 knapsack and advanced-priority-based 0/1 knapsack, we can ensure a balanced transaction selection, quicker verification, higher transaction throughput, reduced carbon emission, and increased earnings for the miners. Moreover, with the addition of only one of our proposed sustainable blocks, we can cut down verification times by 50% and increase throughput by 39%. We can also reduce carbon emissions per transaction by 61.3%, which would help reduce Bitcoins’ large carbon footprint, enabling us to approach greener digital transactions.

This paper designs and develops a computational intelligence-based framework using convolutional neural network (CNN) and genetic algorithm (GA) to detect COVID-19 cases. The framework utilizes a multi-access edge computing technology such that end-user can access available resources as well the CNN on the cloud. Early detection of COVID-19 can improve treatment and mitigate transmission. During peaks of infection, hospitals worldwide have suffered from heavy patient loads, bed shortages, inadequate testing kits and short-staffing problems. Due to the time-consuming nature of the standard RT-PCR test, the lack of expert radiologists, and evaluation issues relating to poor quality images, patients with severe conditions are sometimes unable to receive timely treatment. It is thus recommended to incorporate computational intelligence methodologies, which provides highly accurate detection in a matter of minutes, alongside traditional testing as an emergency measure. CNN has achieved extraordinary performance in numerous computational intelligence tasks. However, finding a systematic, automatic and optimal set of hyperparameters for building an efficient CNN for complex tasks remains challenging. Moreover, due to advancement of technology, data are collected at sparse location and hence accumulation of data from such a diverse sparse location poses a challenge. In this article, we propose a framework of computational intelligence-based algorithm that utilize the recent 5G mobile technology of multi-access edge computing along with a new CNN-model for automatic COVID-19 detection using raw chest X-ray images. This algorithm suggests that anyone having a 5G device (e.g., 5G mobile phone) should be able to use the CNN-based automatic COVID-19 detection tool. As part of the proposed automated model, the model introduces a novel CNN structure with the genetic algorithm (GA) for hyperparameter tuning. One such combination of GA and CNN is new in the application of COVID-19 detection/classification. The experimental results show that the developed framework could classify COVID-19 X-ray images with 98.48% accuracy which is higher than any of the performances achieved by other studies.

In recent years, trust-boundary protection has become a challenging problem in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) environments. Trust boundaries separate IIoT processes and data stores in different groups based on user access privilege. Points where dataflow intersects with the trust boundary are becoming entry points for attackers. Attackers use various model skewing and intelligent techniques to generate adversarial/noisy examples that are indistinguishable from natural data. Many of the existing machine-learning (ML)-based approaches attempt to circumvent this problem. However, owing to an extremely large attack surface in the IIoT network, capturing a true distribution during training is difficult. The standard generative adversarial network (GAN) commonly generates adversarial examples for training using randomly sampled noise. However, the distribution of noisy inputs of GAN largely differs from actual distribution of data in IIoT networks and shows less robustness against adversarial attacks. Therefore, in this article, we propose a downsampler-encoder-based cooperative data generator that is trained using an algorithm to ensure better capture of the actual distribution of attack models for the large IIoT attack surface. The proposed downsampler-based data generator is alternatively updated and verified during training using a deep neural network discriminator to ensure robustness. This guarantees the performance of the generator against input sets with a high noise level at time of training and testing. Various experiments are conducted on a real IIoT testbed data set. Experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms conventional deep learning and other ML techniques in terms of robustness against adversarial/noisy examples in the IIoT environment.

The rapid development of Internet of Things (IoT) platforms provides the industrial domain with many critical solutions, such as joint venture virtual production systems. However, the extensive interconnection of industrial systems with corporate systems in industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) networks exposes the industrial domain to severe cyber risks. Because of many proprietary multilevel protocols, limited upgrade opportunities, heterogeneous communication infrastructures, and a very large trust boundary, conventional IT security fails to prevent cyberattacks against IIoT networks. Recent secure protocols, such as secure distributed network protocol (DNP 3.0), are limited to weak hash functions for critical response time requirements. As a complementary, we propose an adaptive trust boundary protection for IIoT networks using a deep-learning, feature-extraction-based semisupervised model. Our proposed approach is novel in that it is compatible with multilevel protocols of IIoT. The proposed approach does not require any manual effort to update the attack databases and can learn the rapidly changing natures of unknown attack models using unsupervised learnings and unlabeled data from the wild. Therefore, the proposed approach is resilient to emerging cyberattacks and their dynamic nature. The proposed approach has been verified using a real IIoT testbed. Extensive experimental analysis of the attack models and results shows that the proposed approach significantly improves the identification of attacks over conventional security control techniques.

The trustworthiness of an industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) network is an important stakeholder expectation. Maintaining the trustworthiness of such a network is crucial to void the loss of lives. A trustworthy IIoT system combines the security characteristics of IT trustworthiness-safety, security, privacy, reliability, and resilience. Conventional security tools and techniques are not enough to safeguard the IIoT platform due to the difference in protocols, limited upgrade opportunities, mismatch in protocols, and older versions of the operating system used in the industrial system. In this article, we propose to improve the trustworthiness of an IIoT network [i.e., supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) network] through a reliable and salable cyberattack detection model. In particular, an ensemble-learning model based on the combination of a random subspace (RS) learning method with random tree (RT) is proposed for detecting cyberattacks of SCADA by using the network traffics from the SCADA-based IIoT platform. The novelty of the proposed model is that it uses the industrial protocol-based network traffic and the RS to solve the sensitivity of irrelevant features and ensemble RT to reduce the overfitting problem, thereby constructs a detection engine based on industrial protocols and achieves high detection rates. The proposed model has been tested over 15 datasets of the SCADA network. Experimental results reveal that the proposed model outperforms conventional detection techniques and, thus, improves the security and related measure of the trustworthiness of the IIoT platform.

Summary Malware replicates itself and produces offspring with the same characteristics but different signatures by using code obfuscation techniques. Current generation anti‐virus engines employ a signature‐template type detection approach where malware can easily evade existing signatures in the database. This reduces the capability of current anti‐virus engines in detecting malware. In this paper, we propose a stepwise binary logistic regression‐based dimensionality reduction techniques for malware detection using application program interface (API) call statistics. Finding the most significant malware feature using traditional wrapper‐based approaches takes an exponential complexity of the dimension (m) of the dataset with a brute‐force search strategies and order of (m‐1) complexity with a backward elimination filter heuristics. The novelty of the proposed approach is that it finds the worst case computational complexity which is less than order of (m‐1). The proposed approach uses multi‐linear regression and thep‐value of each individual API feature for selection of the most uncorrelated and significant features in order to reduce the dimensionality of the large malware data and to ensure the absence of multi‐collinearity. The stepwise logistic regression approach is then employed to test the significance of the individual malware feature based on their corresponding Wald statistic and to construct the binary decision the model. When the selected most significant APIs are used in a decision rule generation systems, this approach not only reduces the tree size but also improves classification performance. Exhaustive experiments on a large malware data set show that the proposed approach clearly exceeds the existing standard decision rule, support vector machine‐based template approach with complete data and provides a better statistical fitness. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The expectation maximization (EM) is the standard training algorithm for hidden Markov model (HMM). However, EM faces a local convergence problem in HMM estimation. This paper attempts to overcome this problem of EM and proposes hybrid metaheuristic approaches to EM for HMM. In our earlier research, a hybrid of a constraint-based evolutionary learning approach to EM (CEL-EM) improved HMM estimation. In this paper, we propose a hybrid simulated annealing stochastic version of EM (SASEM) that combines simulated annealing (SA) with EM. The novelty of our approach is that we develop a mathematical reformulation of HMM estimation by introducing a stochastic step between the EM steps and combine SA with EM to provide better control over the acceptance of stochastic and EM steps for better HMM estimation. We also extend our earlier work and propose a second hybrid which is a combination of an EA and the proposed SASEM, (EA-SASEM). The proposed EA-SASEM uses the best constraint-based EA strategies from CEL-EM and stochastic reformulation of HMM. The complementary properties of EA and SA and stochastic reformulation of HMM of SASEM provide EA-SASEM with sufficient potential to find better estimation for HMM. To the best of our knowledge, this type of hybridization and mathematical reformulation have not been explored in the context of EM and HMM training. The proposed approaches have been evaluated through comprehensive experiments to justify their effectiveness in signal modeling using the speech corpus: TIMIT. Experimental results show that proposed approaches obtain higher recognition accuracies than the EM algorithm and CEL-EM as well.

Robocup is a popular test bed for AI programs around the world. Robosoccer is one of the two major parts of Robocup, in which AIBO entertainment robots take part in the middle sized soccer event. The three key challenges that robots need to face in this event are manoeuvrability, image recognition and decision making skills. This paper focuses on the decision making problem in Robosoccer -- The goal keeper problem. We investigate whether reinforcement learning (RL) as a form of semi-supervised learning can effectively contribute to the goal keeper's decision making process when penalty shot and two attacker problem are considered. Currently, the decision making process in Robosoccer is carried out using rule-base system. RL also is used for quadruped locomotion and navigation purpose in Robosoccer using AIBO. In this paper, we propose a reinforcement learning based approach that uses a dynamic state-action mapping using back propagation of reward and space quantized Q-learning (SQQL) for the choice of high level functions in order to save the goal. The novelty of our approach is that the agent learns while playing and can take independent decision which overcomes the limitations of rule-base system due to fixed and limited predefined decision rules. Performance of the proposed method has been verified against the bench mark data set made with Upenn'03 code logic. It was found that the efficiency of our SQQL approach in goalkeeping was better than the rule based approach. The SQQL develops a semi-supervised learning process over the rule-base system's input-output mapping process, given in the Upenn'03 code.

Radio frequency identification (RFID) is a remote identification technique promises to revolutionize the way a specific object use to identify in our industry. However, large scale implementation of RFID sought for protection, against Malware threat, information privacy and un-traceability, for low cost RFID tag. In this paper, we propose a framework to provide privacy for tag data and to provide protection for RFID system from malware. In the proposed framework, malware infected tag is detected by analysing individual component of the RFID tag. It uses sanitization technique for analysing individual component. Here authentication based shared unique parameters is used as a method to protect privacy. This authentication protocol will be capable of handling forward and backward security and identifying rogue reader better than existing protocols. Using this framework, the RFID system will be protected from malware and the privacy of the tag will be ensured as well.

Discovery of interesting rules describing the behavioural patterns of smokers' quitting intentions is an important task in the determination of an effective tobacco control strategy. In this paper, we investigate a compact and simplified rule discovery process for predicting smokers' quitting behaviour that can provide feedback to build an scientific evidence-based adaptive tobacco control policy. Standard decision tree (SDT) based rule discovery depends on decision boundaries in the feature space which are orthogonal to the axis of the feature of a particular decision node. This may limit the ability of SDT to learn intermediate concepts for high dimensional large datasets such as tobacco control. In this paper, we propose a cluster based rule discovery model (CRDM) for generation of more compact and simplified rules for the enhancement of tobacco control policy. The cluster-based approach builds conceptual groups from which a set of decision trees (a decision forest) are constructed. Experimental results on the tobacco control data set show that decision rules from the decision forest constructed by CRDM are simpler and can predict smokers' quitting intention more accurately than a single decision tree.

Feature selection is an important research problem in machine learning and data mining applications. This paper proposes a hybrid wrapper and filter feature selection algorithm by introducing the filter's feature ranking score in the wrapper stage to speed up the search process for wrapper and thereby finding a more compact feature subset. The approach hybridizes a Mutual Information (MI) based Maximum Relevance (MR) filter ranking heuristic with an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) based wrapper approach where Artificial Neural Network Input Gain Measurement Approximation (ANNIGMA) has been combined with MR (MR-ANNIGMA) to guide the search process in the wrapper. The novelty of our approach is that we use hybrid of wrapper and filter methods that combines filter's ranking score with the wrapper-heuristic's score to take advantages of both filter and wrapper heuristics. Performance of the proposed MR-ANNIGMA has been verified using bench mark data sets and compared to both independent filter and wrapper based approaches. Experimental results show that MR-ANNIGMA achieves more compact feature sets and higher accuracies than both filter and wrapper approaches alone.

This paper attempts to overcome the tendency of the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm to locate a local rather than global maximum when applied to estimate the hidden Markov model (HMM) parameters in speech signal modeling. We propose a hybrid algorithm for estimation of the HMM in automatic speech recognition (ASR) using a constraint-based evolutionary algorithm (EA) and EM, the CEL-EM. The novelty of our hybrid algorithm (CEL-EM) is that it is applicable for estimation of the constraint-based models with many constraints and large numbers of parameters (which use EM) like HMM. Two constraint-based versions of the CEL-EM with different fusion strategies have been proposed using a constraint-based EA and the EM for better estimation of HMM in ASR. The first one uses a traditional constraint-handling mechanism of EA. The other version transforms a constrained optimization problem into an unconstrained problem using Lagrange multipliers. Fusion strategies for the CEL-EM use a staged-fusion approach where EM has been plugged with the EA periodically after the execution of EA for a specific period of time to maintain the global sampling capabilities of EA in the hybrid algorithm. A variable initialization approach (VIA) has been proposed using a variable segmentation to provide a better initialization for EA in the CEL-EM. Experimental results on the TIMIT speech corpus show that CEL-EM obtains higher recognition accuracies than the traditional EM algorithm as well as a top-standard EM (VIA-EM, constructed by applying the VIA to EM).