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Cloud Computing (CC) and virtualization concepts are two advanced technologies introduced to empower distance and blended learning. Besides, they play a crucial role in equipping learners with practical skills and fostering hands-on experience to defend against cyber-attacks. Many Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in developed countries have already embraced the promise of CC to raise educational standards. However, the pace of its adoption in developing countries has stagnated. Moreover, existing solutions in the literature are not sustainable. They either rely on on-premise infrastructure or are bound by a single cloud service provider. Consequently, they are likely prone to failures and a sudden outage. To fill this gap, this paper is a first that comprehensively addresses the above issues and introduces a federated hybrid CC system based on an extension of Apache Virtual Computing Lab (VCL). The proposed system provides an independent opensource implementation, greater configuration flexibility, and methodological improvements as compared to existing studies in the literature. In addition, it promotes the sustainability of the CC services, extensible cloud architecture, and fault tolerance. VCL is primarily focused on provisioning Virtual Laboratories (VL) for remote cybersecurity and computer networks education, with potential expansion to other domains of engineering education. In addition, this paper introduces GPT-TerminalPro, a terminal-based tool driven by OpenAI's Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT-3.5) that provides intelligent assistance to users while performing lab tasks. To experimentally evaluate the VCL's performance, the standard Linux tools as well as the Apache benchmark and httperf HTTP load generators are utilized. VCL has been tested with 30 users and 61 virtual user computing environments provisioning to validate the overall performance. The results are fascinating: the provisioning time including all VCL background tasks is always le

The coronavirus pandemic has overburdened medical institutions, forcing physicians to diagnose and treat their patients remotely. Moreover, COVID-19 has made humans more conscious about their health, resulting in the extensive purchase of IoT-enabled medical devices. The rapid boom in the market worth of the internet of medical things (IoMT) captured cyber attackers attention. Like health, medical data is also sensitive and worth a lot on the dark web. Despite the fact that the patients health details have not been protected appropriately, letting the trespassers exploit them. The system administrator is unable to fortify security measures due to the limited storage capacity and computation power of the resource-constrained network devices. Although various supervised and unsupervised machine learning algorithms have been developed to identify anomalies, the primary undertaking is to explore the swift progressing malicious attacks before they deteriorate the wellness systems integrity. In this paper, a Dew-Cloud based model is designed to enable hierarchical federated learning (HFL). The proposed Dew-Cloud model provides a higher level of data privacy with greater availability of IoMT critical application(s). The hierarchical long-term memory (HLSTM) model is deployed at distributed Dew servers with a backend supported by cloud computing. Data pre-processing feature helps the proposed model achieve high training accuracy (99.31%) with minimum training loss (0.034). The experiment results demonstrate that the proposed HFL-HLSTM model is superior to existing schemes in terms of performance metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, and f-score., Funding Agencies|CENIIT Project [17.01]; Excellence Center at Linkoeping-Lund in IT (ELLIIT)

The coronavirus pandemic has overburdened medical institutions, forcing physicians to diagnose and treat their patients remotely. Moreover, COVID-19 has made humans more conscious about their health, resulting in the extensive purchase of IoT-enabled medical devices. The rapid boom in the market worth of the internet of medical things (IoMT) captured cyber attackers attention. Like health, medical data is also sensitive and worth a lot on the dark web. Despite the fact that the patients health details have not been protected appropriately, letting the trespassers exploit them. The system administrator is unable to fortify security measures due to the limited storage capacity and computation power of the resource-constrained network devices. Although various supervised and unsupervised machine learning algorithms have been developed to identify anomalies, the primary undertaking is to explore the swift progressing malicious attacks before they deteriorate the wellness systems integrity. In this paper, a Dew-Cloud based model is designed to enable hierarchical federated learning (HFL). The proposed Dew-Cloud model provides a higher level of data privacy with greater availability of IoMT critical application(s). The hierarchical long-term memory (HLSTM) model is deployed at distributed Dew servers with a backend supported by cloud computing. Data pre-processing feature helps the proposed model achieve high training accuracy (99.31%) with minimum training loss (0.034). The experiment results demonstrate that the proposed HFL-HLSTM model is superior to existing schemes in terms of performance metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, and f-score., Funding Agencies|CENIIT Project [17.01]; Excellence Center at Linkoeping-Lund in IT (ELLIIT)

The coronavirus pandemic has overburdened medical institutions, forcing physicians to diagnose and treat their patients remotely. Moreover, COVID-19 has made humans more conscious about their health, resulting in the extensive purchase of IoT-enabled medical devices. The rapid boom in the market worth of the internet of medical things (IoMT) captured cyber attackers attention. Like health, medical data is also sensitive and worth a lot on the dark web. Despite the fact that the patients health details have not been protected appropriately, letting the trespassers exploit them. The system administrator is unable to fortify security measures due to the limited storage capacity and computation power of the resource-constrained network devices. Although various supervised and unsupervised machine learning algorithms have been developed to identify anomalies, the primary undertaking is to explore the swift progressing malicious attacks before they deteriorate the wellness systems integrity. In this paper, a Dew-Cloud based model is designed to enable hierarchical federated learning (HFL). The proposed Dew-Cloud model provides a higher level of data privacy with greater availability of IoMT critical application(s). The hierarchical long-term memory (HLSTM) model is deployed at distributed Dew servers with a backend supported by cloud computing. Data pre-processing feature helps the proposed model achieve high training accuracy (99.31%) with minimum training loss (0.034). The experiment results demonstrate that the proposed HFL-HLSTM model is superior to existing schemes in terms of performance metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, and f-score., Funding Agencies|CENIIT Project [17.01]; Excellence Center at Linkoeping-Lund in IT (ELLIIT)

The coronavirus pandemic has overburdened medical institutions, forcing physicians to diagnose and treat their patients remotely. Moreover, COVID-19 has made humans more conscious about their health, resulting in the extensive purchase of IoT-enabled medical devices. The rapid boom in the market worth of the internet of medical things (IoMT) captured cyber attackers attention. Like health, medical data is also sensitive and worth a lot on the dark web. Despite the fact that the patients health details have not been protected appropriately, letting the trespassers exploit them. The system administrator is unable to fortify security measures due to the limited storage capacity and computation power of the resource-constrained network devices. Although various supervised and unsupervised machine learning algorithms have been developed to identify anomalies, the primary undertaking is to explore the swift progressing malicious attacks before they deteriorate the wellness systems integrity. In this paper, a Dew-Cloud based model is designed to enable hierarchical federated learning (HFL). The proposed Dew-Cloud model provides a higher level of data privacy with greater availability of IoMT critical application(s). The hierarchical long-term memory (HLSTM) model is deployed at distributed Dew servers with a backend supported by cloud computing. Data pre-processing feature helps the proposed model achieve high training accuracy (99.31%) with minimum training loss (0.034). The experiment results demonstrate that the proposed HFL-HLSTM model is superior to existing schemes in terms of performance metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, and f-score., Funding Agencies|CENIIT Project [17.01]; Excellence Center at Linkoeping-Lund in IT (ELLIIT)

The coronavirus pandemic has overburdened medical institutions, forcing physicians to diagnose and treat their patients remotely. Moreover, COVID-19 has made humans more conscious about their health, resulting in the extensive purchase of IoT-enabled medical devices. The rapid boom in the market worth of the internet of medical things (IoMT) captured cyber attackers attention. Like health, medical data is also sensitive and worth a lot on the dark web. Despite the fact that the patients health details have not been protected appropriately, letting the trespassers exploit them. The system administrator is unable to fortify security measures due to the limited storage capacity and computation power of the resource-constrained network devices. Although various supervised and unsupervised machine learning algorithms have been developed to identify anomalies, the primary undertaking is to explore the swift progressing malicious attacks before they deteriorate the wellness systems integrity. In this paper, a Dew-Cloud based model is designed to enable hierarchical federated learning (HFL). The proposed Dew-Cloud model provides a higher level of data privacy with greater availability of IoMT critical application(s). The hierarchical long-term memory (HLSTM) model is deployed at distributed Dew servers with a backend supported by cloud computing. Data pre-processing feature helps the proposed model achieve high training accuracy (99.31%) with minimum training loss (0.034). The experiment results demonstrate that the proposed HFL-HLSTM model is superior to existing schemes in terms of performance metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, and f-score., Funding Agencies|CENIIT Project [17.01]; Excellence Center at Linkoeping-Lund in IT (ELLIIT)

The aviation industry faces significant challenges due to rising global air travel demand. Frequency saturation in Air Traffic Management (ATM) leads to communication problems, necessitating the enhancement of traditional systems. The Single European Sky ATM Research (SESAR) initiative, backed by the European Commission, aims to digitize ATM, with the L-band Digital Aeronautical Communications System (LDACS) as a key component. LDACS aims to improve communication, enhance surveillance, and optimize airspace usage for safer, more efficient ATM. Although LDACS is protected against most cyberattacks, a critical security objective, anonymity, is currently overlooked. To strengthen LDACS's security, robust authentication mechanisms, Post-Quantum security, and measures to ensure aircraft anonymity are crucial. Therefore, we propose a comprehensive security framework to enhance LDACS's cybersecurity, focusing on mutual authentication and key agreement. The protocol uses Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) for robust mutual authentication and Bit-flipping Key Encapsulation (BIKE) for secure session key establishment utilizing Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC). This framework ensures anonymity and secure communication between aircraft and ground stations while minimizing message exchange, latency, and data overhead. An informal security analysis confirms our proposed framework's potential to augment the efficiency and security of ATM operations., Funding Agencies|Trafikverket and Luftfartsverket under Automation Program II; Autonomous Systems and Software Program (WASP)

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) in Internet of Things (IoT) has empowered healthcare professionals to monitor, diagnose, and treat patients remotely. Besides, the AmI-IoT has improved patient engagement and gratification as doctors interactions have become more comfortable and efficient. However, the benefits of the AmI-IoT-based healthcare applications are not availed entirely due to the adversarial threats. IoT networks are prone to cyber attacks due to vulnerable wireless mediums and the absentia of lightweight and robust security protocols. This paper introduces computationally-inexpensive privacy-assuring authentication protocol for AmI-IoT healthcare applications. The use of blockchain & fog computing in the protocol guarantees unforgeability, non-repudiation, transparency, low latency, and efficient bandwidth utilization. The protocol uses physically unclonable functions (PUF), biometrics, and Ethereum powered smart contracts to prevent replay, impersonation, and cloning attacks. Results prove the resource efficiency of the protocol as the smart contract incurs very minimal gas and transaction fees. The Scyther results validate the robustness of the proposed protocol against cyber-attacks. The protocol applies lightweight cryptography primitives (Hash, PUF) instead of conventional public-key cryptography and scalar multiplications. Consequently, the proposed protocol is better than centralized infrastructure-based authentication approaches., Funding Agencies|Taif University, Taif, Saudi Arabia [TURSP-2020/10]; CENIIT [17.01]; Excellence Center at Linkping-Lund in IT (ELLIIT)

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) in Internet of Things (IoT) has empowered healthcare professionals to monitor, diagnose, and treat patients remotely. Besides, the AmI-IoT has improved patient engagement and gratification as doctors interactions have become more comfortable and efficient. However, the benefits of the AmI-IoT-based healthcare applications are not availed entirely due to the adversarial threats. IoT networks are prone to cyber attacks due to vulnerable wireless mediums and the absentia of lightweight and robust security protocols. This paper introduces computationally-inexpensive privacy-assuring authentication protocol for AmI-IoT healthcare applications. The use of blockchain & fog computing in the protocol guarantees unforgeability, non-repudiation, transparency, low latency, and efficient bandwidth utilization. The protocol uses physically unclonable functions (PUF), biometrics, and Ethereum powered smart contracts to prevent replay, impersonation, and cloning attacks. Results prove the resource efficiency of the protocol as the smart contract incurs very minimal gas and transaction fees. The Scyther results validate the robustness of the proposed protocol against cyber-attacks. The protocol applies lightweight cryptography primitives (Hash, PUF) instead of conventional public-key cryptography and scalar multiplications. Consequently, the proposed protocol is better than centralized infrastructure-based authentication approaches., Funding Agencies|Taif University, Taif, Saudi Arabia [TURSP-2020/10]; CENIIT [17.01]; Excellence Center at Linkping-Lund in IT (ELLIIT)

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) in Internet of Things (IoT) has empowered healthcare professionals to monitor, diagnose, and treat patients remotely. Besides, the AmI-IoT has improved patient engagement and gratification as doctors interactions have become more comfortable and efficient. However, the benefits of the AmI-IoT-based healthcare applications are not availed entirely due to the adversarial threats. IoT networks are prone to cyber attacks due to vulnerable wireless mediums and the absentia of lightweight and robust security protocols. This paper introduces computationally-inexpensive privacy-assuring authentication protocol for AmI-IoT healthcare applications. The use of blockchain & fog computing in the protocol guarantees unforgeability, non-repudiation, transparency, low latency, and efficient bandwidth utilization. The protocol uses physically unclonable functions (PUF), biometrics, and Ethereum powered smart contracts to prevent replay, impersonation, and cloning attacks. Results prove the resource efficiency of the protocol as the smart contract incurs very minimal gas and transaction fees. The Scyther results validate the robustness of the proposed protocol against cyber-attacks. The protocol applies lightweight cryptography primitives (Hash, PUF) instead of conventional public-key cryptography and scalar multiplications. Consequently, the proposed protocol is better than centralized infrastructure-based authentication approaches., Funding Agencies|Taif University, Taif, Saudi Arabia [TURSP-2020/10]; CENIIT [17.01]; Excellence Center at Linkping-Lund in IT (ELLIIT)

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) in Internet of Things (IoT) has empowered healthcare professionals to monitor, diagnose, and treat patients remotely. Besides, the AmI-IoT has improved patient engagement and gratification as doctors interactions have become more comfortable and efficient. However, the benefits of the AmI-IoT-based healthcare applications are not availed entirely due to the adversarial threats. IoT networks are prone to cyber attacks due to vulnerable wireless mediums and the absentia of lightweight and robust security protocols. This paper introduces computationally-inexpensive privacy-assuring authentication protocol for AmI-IoT healthcare applications. The use of blockchain & fog computing in the protocol guarantees unforgeability, non-repudiation, transparency, low latency, and efficient bandwidth utilization. The protocol uses physically unclonable functions (PUF), biometrics, and Ethereum powered smart contracts to prevent replay, impersonation, and cloning attacks. Results prove the resource efficiency of the protocol as the smart contract incurs very minimal gas and transaction fees. The Scyther results validate the robustness of the proposed protocol against cyber-attacks. The protocol applies lightweight cryptography primitives (Hash, PUF) instead of conventional public-key cryptography and scalar multiplications. Consequently, the proposed protocol is better than centralized infrastructure-based authentication approaches., Funding Agencies|Taif University, Taif, Saudi Arabia [TURSP-2020/10]; CENIIT [17.01]; Excellence Center at Linkping-Lund in IT (ELLIIT)

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) in Internet of Things (IoT) has empowered healthcare professionals to monitor, diagnose, and treat patients remotely. Besides, the AmI-IoT has improved patient engagement and gratification as doctors interactions have become more comfortable and efficient. However, the benefits of the AmI-IoT-based healthcare applications are not availed entirely due to the adversarial threats. IoT networks are prone to cyber attacks due to vulnerable wireless mediums and the absentia of lightweight and robust security protocols. This paper introduces computationally-inexpensive privacy-assuring authentication protocol for AmI-IoT healthcare applications. The use of blockchain & fog computing in the protocol guarantees unforgeability, non-repudiation, transparency, low latency, and efficient bandwidth utilization. The protocol uses physically unclonable functions (PUF), biometrics, and Ethereum powered smart contracts to prevent replay, impersonation, and cloning attacks. Results prove the resource efficiency of the protocol as the smart contract incurs very minimal gas and transaction fees. The Scyther results validate the robustness of the proposed protocol against cyber-attacks. The protocol applies lightweight cryptography primitives (Hash, PUF) instead of conventional public-key cryptography and scalar multiplications. Consequently, the proposed protocol is better than centralized infrastructure-based authentication approaches., Funding Agencies|Taif University, Taif, Saudi Arabia [TURSP-2020/10]; CENIIT [17.01]; Excellence Center at Linkping-Lund in IT (ELLIIT)