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Smart Grid (SG) is a major electricity trend expected to replace traditional electricity systems. SG has faster response to electricity malfunctions and improved utilization of consumed power, and it has two-way communication between providers and consumers. However, SG is vulnerable to attacks and requires robust authentication techniques to provide secure authenticity for its components. This paper analyses previous literature, comprising 27 papers on the status of SG authentication techniques, main components, and kinds of attacks. This paper also highlights the main requirements and challenges for developing authentication approaches for the SG system. This can serve as useful guidance for the development and deployment of authentication techniques for SG systems and helps practitioners select authentication approaches applicable to system needs.

In the past few years, various lightweight cryptographic algorithms have been proposed to balance the trade-offs between the requirements of resource constrained IoT devices and the need to securely transmit and protect data. However, it is critical to analyze and evaluate these algorithms to examine their capabilities. This paper provides a thorough investigation of the randomness of ciphertext obtained from Simeck, Kasumi, DES and AES. The design of our randomness analysis is based on five metrics implemented following the guidance of the NIST statistical test suite for cryptographic applications. This analysis also provides performance and power consumption evaluations for the selected cryptographic algorithms using different platforms and measures. Results from the evaluation reveal that lightweight algorithms have competitive randomness levels, lower processing time and lower power consumption when compared to conventional algorithms.

Vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is one of the most promising and emerging communication technologies that could definitely lead to significant improvements in the traffic management and safety. Location privacy is a critical requirement in VANET, since location information may be shared between vehicles to support the VANET applications. Therefore, it is crucial to protect the location of users. In this paper, we propose a location privacy protection technique that utilises the shadow concept and takes into consideration the reliability in protecting the group leader location, which would basically provide the needed anonymity and protection for the location information targeted by global adversaries. The performance of the proposed technique has been investigated through simulation and compared against the well-known AOSA technique. The results from extensive simulations have shown that the proposed technique enhances the anonymity of the group leader vehicle by reducing the time that the global adversaries can use in collecting location information.

Social Engineering Attack has recently become a real threat affecting organizations, and 53.9% of such attacks target the banking sector. Successful attacks violate privacy by breaching sensitive data, and can cause huge financial loss for organizations and individuals, alongside reputational damage for firms. Although banks invest extensive resources in cyber security, with large budgets spent on securing their hardware and software, the human factor offers numerous weaknesses that can be easily exploited, and real and pertinent security challenges remain serious threats. This paper presents an information technology governance framework applied on a Jordanian bank to protect the system from social engineering attack. We worked on a case study that mainly focuses on phishing attack, which is considered one of the most common threats in banks, and the way staff will deal with it. The results show positive improvements in staff awareness and in avoiding such types of attacks, as well as a marked increase in reporting any suspicious activity noticed by employees.

Interconnecting voice service providers require a mutual trust between communicating entities, which are built either using bilateral agreements or intermediary service provider. To achieve such relationship between Anonymous Service Providers we should have an automated mechanism. In this paper, we propose a conceptual architecture that can build such relationship between communicating Anonymous Service Providers. By applying this architecture, we argue that we can increase efficiency, security, and performance of service provider's networks. The impact of internet speed on the interconnection network is measured using key metrics including ACD, ASR, PDD, NER, and MOS.

Group vehicular applications could play a vital role in our life, whether these applications are safety-oriented or convenience-oriented applications. The group concept has also been used in support of many solutions in VANETs. Reference Point Group Mobility model (RPGM) is a popular group mobility model and has been used heavily in the literature. In order to study the impact of this mobility model on routing in VANETs, two well-known protocols are considered, namely AODV and AOMDV, as representatives of single-path and multipath routing, respectively. These protocols have shown performance merits over other routing protocols and they have a vital role in other wireless networks including MANETs and Wireless Mesh Networks. This paper provides a thorough evaluation of these protocols, by examining them under various potential realistic scenarios, under the RPGM mobility model. To the best of knowledge, this is the first study that examines the behaviour of the two protocols under the RPGM mobility model. The results from extensive simulations have shown that both protocols have comparable performance merits when the number of communicating nodes is low. However, increasing the number of communicating nodes has demonstrated a performance advantage for AOMDV, in the majority of the performance metrics used in the paper.

Smart Grid (SG) provides enhancement to existing grids with two-way communication between the utility, sensors, and consumers, by deploying smart sensors to monitor and manage power consumption. However due to the vulnerability of SG, secure component authenticity necessitates robust authentication approaches relative to limited resource availability (i.e. in terms of memory and computational power). SG communication entails optimum efficiency of authentication approaches to avoid any extraneous burden. This systematic review analyses 27 papers on SG authentication techniques and their effectiveness in mitigating certain attacks. This provides a basis for the design and use of optimized SG authentication approaches.

This paper presents the design, development and experimentation of ArgMed, an interactive system aimed at supporting decision making processes that occur during clinical discussions. Clinical discussions take place on a regular basis in hospital wards and provide the forum for specialists of various medical disciplines to focus on critical cases, debate about diagnostic hypotheses, therapeutic protocols or follow-up of patient conditions, and to devise the most appropriate treatments. However, in the current medical practice, clinical discussions are usually not documented, and only the final decision is recorded on patient medical records. Therefore, some decision alternatives may get lost, the justifications for decisions made are not clarified, and the reasons in favor or against a diagnosis or a treatment remain implicit. ArgMed addresses these issues by supporting (1) the representation of discussions in a structured yet intuitive way, (2) the formalization of discussions from a logical perspective on the basis of a set of reasoning patterns (argumentation schemes) that are considered valid in the specific medical domain, (3) the identification of plausible conclusions, as well as invalid reasoning steps, hidden assumptions, or missing evidences. The paper describes the approach adopted for ArgMed design, the system architecture and operation, and the knowledge-based engine that implements decision support. The results of a preliminary experimentation of ArgMed in a real clinical environment are finally discussed.