Asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols have garnered significant attention with the rise of blockchain technology. A typical asynchronous protocol is designed by executing sequential instances of the Asynchronous Common Sub-seQuence (ACSQ). The ACSQ protocol consists of two primary components: the Asynchronous Common Subset (ACS) protocol and a block sorting mechanism, with the ACS protocol comprising two stages: broadcast and agreement. However, current protocols encounter three critical issues: high latency arising from the execution of the agreement stage, latency instability due to the integral-sorting mechanism, and reduced throughput caused by block discarding. To address these issues, we propose Falcon, an asynchronous BFT protocol that achieves low latency and enhanced throughput. Falcon introduces a novel broadcast protocol, Graded Broadcast (GBC), which enables a block to be included in the ACS set directly, bypassing the agreement stage and thereby reducing latency. To ensure safety, Falcon incorporates a new binary agreement protocol called Asymmetrical Asynchronous Binary Agreement (AABA), designed to complement GBC. Additionally, Falcon employs a partial-sorting mechanism, allowing continuous rather than simultaneous block committing, enhancing latency stability. Finally, we incorporate an agreement trigger that, before its activation, enables nodes to wait for more blocks to be delivered and committed, thereby boosting throughput. We conduct a series of experiments to evaluate Falcon, demonstrating its superior performance.

Non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) is a cost-effective energy disaggregation means to estimate the energy consumption of individual appliances from a central load reading. Learning-based methods are the new trends in NILM implementations but require large labeled data to work properly at end-user premises. We first formulate an unsupervised multi-source domain adaptation problem to address this challenge by leveraging rich public datasets for building the NILM model. Then, we prove a new generalization bound for the target domain under multi-source settings. A hybrid loss-driven multi-source domain adversarial network (HLD-MDAN) is developed by approximating and optimizing the bound to tackle the domain shift between source and target domains. We conduct extensive experiments on three real-world residential energy datasets to evaluate the effectiveness of HLD-MDAN, showing that it is superior to other methods in single-source and multi-source learning scenarios.

Although the field of eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) has a significant interest these days, its implementation within cyber security applications still needs further investigation to understand its effectiveness in discovering attack surfaces and vectors. In cyber defence, especially anomaly-based Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS), the emerging applications of machine/deep learning models require the interpretation of the models' architecture and the explanation of models' prediction to examine how cyberattacks would occur. This paper proposes a novel explainable intrusion detection framework in the Internet of Things (IoT) networks. We have developed an IDS using a Short-Term Long Memory (LSTM) model to identify cyberattacks and explain the model's decisions. This uses a novel set of input features extracted by a novel SPIP (S: Shapley Additive exPlanations, P: Permutation Feature Importance, I: Individual Conditional Expectation, P: Partial Dependence Plot) framework to train and evaluate the LSTM model. The framework was validated using the NSL-KDD, UNSW-NB15 and TON_IoT datasets. The SPIP framework achieved high detection accuracy, processing time, and high interpretability of data features and model outputs compared with other peer techniques. The proposed framework has the potential to assist administrators and decision-makers in understanding complex attack behaviour.

Blockchain databases have attracted widespread attention but suffer from poor scalability due to underlying non-scalable blockchains. While blockchain sharding is necessary for a scalable blockchain database, it poses a new challenge named on-chain cross-shard database services. Each cross-shard database service (e.g., cross-shard queries or inter-shard load balancing) involves massive cross-shard data exchanges, while the existing cross-shard mechanisms need to process each cross-shard data exchange via the consensus of all nodes in the related shards (i.e., on-chain) to resist a Byzantine environment of blockchain, which eliminates sharding benefits. To tackle the challenge, this paper presents GriDB, the first scalable blockchain database, by designing a novel off-chain cross-shard mechanism for efficient cross-shard database services. Borrowing the idea of off-chain payments, GriDB delegates massive cross-shard data exchange to a few nodes, each of which is randomly picked from a different shard. Considering the Byzantine environment, the untrusted delegates cooperate to generate succinct proof for cross-shard data exchanges, while the consensus is only responsible for the low-cost proof verification. However, different from payments, the database services' verification has more requirements (e.g., completeness, correctness, freshness, and availability); thus, we introduce several new authenticated data structures (ADS). Particularly, we utilize consensus to extend the threat model and reduce the complexity of traditional accumulator-based ADS for verifiable cross-shard queries with a rich set of relational operators. Moreover, we study the necessity of inter-shard load balancing for a scalable blockchain database and design an off-chain and live approach for both efficiency and availability during balancing. An evaluation of our prototype shows the performance of GriDB in terms of scalability in workloads with queries and updates.

Multivariate time series data (Mv-TSD) portray the evolving processes of the system(s) under examination in a “multi-view” manner. Factorization methods are salient for Mv-TSD analysis with the potentials of structural feature construction correlating various data attributes. However, research challenges remain in the derivation of factors due to highly scattered data distribution of Mv-TSD and intensive interferences/outliers embedded in the source data. The proposed Enhanced Bayesian Factorization approach (Enhanced-BF) addresses the challenges in three phases: (1) variant scale partitioning applies to Mv-TSD according to degree of amplitude and obtains the blocks of variant scales; (2) hierarchical Bayesian model for tensor factorization automatically derives the factors of each block with interferences suppressed; (3) Bayesian unification model merges those block factors to construct the final structural features.Enhanced-BFhas been evaluated using a case study of brain data engineering with multivariate electroencephalogram (EEG). Experimental results indicate that the proposed method manifests robustness to the interferences and outperforms the counterparts in terms of operation efficiency and error when factorizing EEG tensor. Besides,Enhanced-BFexcels in factorization-based analysis of ongoing autism spectrum disorder (ASD) EEG: 3 times speed-up in factorization and$87.35\%$accuracy in ASD discrimination. The latent factors (“biomarkers”) can distinctly interpret the typical EEG characteristics of ASD subjects.

Canonical Polyadic Decomposition (CPD) of sparse tensors is an effective tool in various machine learning and data analytics applications, in which sparse Matricized Tensor Times Khatri-Rao Product (MTTKRP) is the major performance bottleneck. To overcome this bottleneck and support efficient applications, this paper presents HPSpTM, an efficient sparse MTTKRP framework, to exploit the multi-level parallelism and reusability on heterogeneous HPC systems. HPSpTM incorporates: (1) a multi-level matrix-driven tiling engine that leverages the process- and thread-level parallelism of the underlying platform and data reusability based on the derived factor matrix-driven MTTKRP algorithm; (2) a tensor-driven parallel execution that enables buffering-aware scheduling and pipeline scheduling to optimize the performance in the tile granularity; (3) a partition-aware light weight data storage that exploits better data locality based on the proposed hierarchical and fine-grained execution; and (4) a performance auto-tuning technique that offers large flexibility for tile size auto-adjusting across various input datasets based on a designed runtime model. Our experiments show that HPSpTM on a Nvidia Tesla P100 obtains the average performance improvement of up to 76.46% over the state-of-the-arts, and HPSpTM achieves the speedup of up to 15.39× when scaling from 8 to 128 core groups, corresponding to processes, on the Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer.

Containerized web-applications have gained popularity recently due to the advantages provided by the containers including light-weight, packaged, fast start up and shut down and easy scalability. As there are more than 267 cloud providers, finding a flexible deployment option for containerized web-applications is very difficult as each cloud offers numerous deployment infrastructure. Benchmarking is one of the eminent options to evaluate the provisioned resources before product-level deployment. However, benchmarking the massive infrastructure resources provisioned by various cloud providers is a time consuming, tedious and costly process and is not practical to accomplish manually.

Smart grid (SG) is an integration of traditional power grid with advanced information and communication infrastructure for bidirectional energy flow between grid and end users. A huge amount of data is being generated by various smart devices deployed in SG systems. Such a massive data generation from various smart devices in SG systems may lead to various challenges for the networking infrastructure deployed between users and the grid. Hence, an efficient data transmission technique is required for providing desired QoS to the end users in this environment. Generally, the data generated by smart devices in SG has high dimensions in the form of multiple heterogeneous attributes, values of which are changed with time. The high dimensions of data may affect the performance of most of the designed solutions in this environment. Most of the existing schemes reported in the literature have complex operations for the data dimensionality reduction problem which may deteriorate the performance of any implemented solution for this problem. To address these challenges, in this paper, a tensor-based big data management scheme is proposed for dimensionality reduction problem of big data generated from various smart devices. In the proposed scheme, first the Frobenius norm is applied on high-order-tensors (used for data representation) to minimize the reconstruction error of the reduced tensors. Then, an empirical probability-based control algorithm is designed to estimate an optimal path to forward the reduced data using software-defined networks for minimization of the network load and effective bandwidth utilization. The proposed scheme minimizes the transmission delay incurred during the movement of the dimensionally reduced data between different nodes. The efficacy of the proposed scheme has been evaluated using extensive simulations carried out on the data traces using `R' programming and Matlab. The big data traces considered for evaluation consist of more than two million entries (2,075,259) collected at one minute sampling rate having hetrogenous features such as-voltage, energy, frequency, electric signals, etc. Moreover, a comparative study for different data traces and a real SG testbed is also presented to prove the efficacy of the proposed scheme. The results obtained depict the effectiveness of the proposed scheme with respect to the parameters such asnetwork delay, accuracy, and throughput.

Use of social network is the basic functionality of today's life. With the advent of more and more online social media, the information available and its utilization have come under the threat of several anomalies. Anomalies are the major cause of online frauds which allow information access by unauthorized users as well as information forging. One of the anomalies that act as a silent attacker is the horizontal anomaly. These are the anomalies caused by a user because of his/her variable behavior towards different sources. Horizontal anomalies are difficult to detect and hazardous for any network. In this paper, a self-healing neuro-fuzzy approach (NHAD) is used for the detection, recovery, and removal of horizontal anomalies efficiently and accurately. The proposed approach operates over the five paradigms, namely, missing links, reputation gain, significant difference, trust properties, and trust score. The proposed approach is evaluated with three datasets: DARPA'98 benchmark dataset, synthetic dataset, and real-time traffic. Results show that the accuracy of the proposed NHAD model for 10 to 30 percent anomalies in synthetic dataset ranges between 98.08 and 99.88 percent. The evaluation over DARPA'98 dataset demonstrates that the proposed approach is better than the existing solutions as it provides 99.97 percent detection rate for anomalous class. For real-time traffic, the proposed NHAD model operates with an average accuracy of 99.42 at 99.90 percent detection rate.