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Since Facebook officially changed its name to Metaverse in Oct. 2021, the metaverse has become a new norm of social networks and three-dimensional (3D) virtual worlds. The metaverse aims to bring 3D immersive and personalized experiences to users by leveraging many pertinent technologies. Despite great attention and benefits, a natural question in the metaverse is how to secure its users' digital content and data. In this regard, blockchain is a promising solution owing to its distinct features of decentralization, immutability, and transparency. To better understand the role of blockchain in the metaverse, we aim to provide an extensive survey on the applications of blockchain for the metaverse. We first present a preliminary to blockchain and the metaverse and highlight the motivations behind the use of blockchain for the metaverse. Next, we extensively discuss blockchain-based methods for the metaverse from technical perspectives, such as data acquisition, data storage, data sharing, data interoperability, and data privacy preservation. For each perspective, we first discuss the technical challenges of the metaverse and then highlight how blockchain can help. Moreover, we investigate the impact of blockchain on key-enabling technologies in the metaverse, including Internet-of-Things, digital twins, multi-sensory and immersive applications, artificial intelligence, and big data. We also present some major projects to showcase the role of blockchain in metaverse applications and services. Finally, we present some promising directions to drive further research innovations and developments towards the use of blockchain in the metaverse in the future., Submitted for peer review

Due to the emergence of heterogeneous Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) (e.g., wearable health devices, smartwatch monitoring, automated insulin delivery systems), large volumes of patient data is dispatched to central cloud servers for disease analysis and diagnosis. Although this direct mode brings a lot of convenience for both patients and medical professionals (MP), the open communication channel between them also incurs several security and privacy issues, such as man-in-the-middle attacks, eavesdropping attacks, and tracking attacks. Based on the unsolved challenges in wireless medical sensor networks (WMSN), several researchers have proposed various authentication and key agreement (AKA) protocols for this type of healthcare system recently. However, most of these protocols do not perceive physical layer security and over-centralized server problem in WMSN. In this paper, to address these two open problems, we propose a lightweight and reliable authentication protocol for WMSN, which is composed of cutting-edge blockchain technology and physically unclonable functions (PUF). In addition, a fuzzy extractor scheme is introduced to deal with biometric information. Subsequently, two security evaluation methods are used to prove the high reliability of our proposed scheme. Finally, performance evaluation experiments illustrate that the proposed mutual authentication protocol requires the least computation and communication cost among the compared schemes.

In recent years, the high improvement in communication, Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing have begun complex questioning in security. Based on the development, cyberattacks can be increased since the present security techniques do not give optimal solutions. As a result, the authors of this paper created filter-based ensemble feature selection (FEFS) and employed a deep learning model (DLM) for cloud computing intrusion detection. Initially, the intrusion data were collected from the global datasets of KDDCup-99 and NSL-KDD. The data were utilized for validation of the proposed methodology. The collected database was utilized for feature selection to empower the intrusion prediction. The FEFS is a combination of three feature extraction processes: filter, wrapper and embedded algorithms. Based on the above feature extraction process, the essential features were selected for enabling the training process in the DLM. Finally, the classifier received the chosen features. The DLM is a combination of a recurrent neural network (RNN) and Tasmanian devil optimization (TDO). In the RNN, the optimal weighting parameter is selected with the assistance of the TDO. The proposed technique was implemented in MATLAB, and its effectiveness was assessed using performance metrics including sensitivity, F measure, precision, sensitivity, recall and accuracy. The proposed method was compared with the conventional techniques such as an RNN and deep neural network (DNN) and RNN–genetic algorithm (RNN-GA), respectively.

Reversible data hiding (RDH) is an active area of research in the field of information security. In RDH, a secret can be embedded inside a cover medium. Unlike other data-hiding schemes, RDH becomes important in applications that demand recovery of the cover without any deformation, along with recovery of the hidden secret. In this paper, a new RDH scheme is proposed for performing reversible data hiding in encrypted images using a Fibonacci transform with an ensemble learning method. In the proposed scheme, the data hider encrypts the original image and performs further data hiding. During data hiding, the encrypted image is partitioned into non-overlapping blocks, with each block considered one-by-one. The selected block undergoes a series of Fibonacci transforms during data hiding. The number of Fibonacci transforms required on a selected block is determined by the integer value that the data hider wants to embed. On the receiver side, message extraction and image restoration are performed with the help of the ensemble learning method. The receiver will try to perform all possible Fibonacci transforms and decrypt the blocks. The recovered block is identified with the help of trained machine-learning models. The novelty of the scheme lies in (1) retaining the encrypted pixel intensities unaltered while hiding the data. Almost every RDH scheme described in the literature alters the encrypted pixel intensities to embed the data, which represents a security concern for the encryption algorithm; (2) Introducing an efficient means of recovery through an ensemble model framework. The majority of votes from the different trained models guarantee the correct recovery of the cover image. The proposed scheme enables reduction in the bit error rate during message extraction and contributes to ensuring the suitability of the scheme in areas such as medical image transmission and cloud computing. The results obtained from experiments undertaken show that the proposed RDH scheme was able to attain an improved payload capacity of 0.0625 bits per pixel, outperforming many related RDH schemes with complete reversibility.

Big Data applications require extensive resources and environments to store, process and analyze this colossal collection of data in a distributed manner. Containerization with cloud computing provides a pertinent remedy to accommodate big data requirements, however requires a precise and appropriate load-balancing mechanism. The load on servers increases exponentially with increased resource usage thus making load balancing an essential requirement. Moreover, the adjustment of containers accurately and rapidly according to load as per services is one of the crucial aspects in big data applications. This study provides a review relating to containerized environments like Docker for big data applications with load balancing. A novel scheduling mechanism of containers for big data applications established on Docker Swarm and Microservice architecture is proposed. The concept of Docker Swarm is utilized to effectively handle big data applications' workload and service discovery. Results shows that increasing workloads with respect to big data applications can be effectively managed by utilizing microservices in containerized environments and load balancing is efficiently achieved using Docker Swarm. The implementation is done using a case study deployed on a single server and then scaled to four instances. Applications developed using containerized microservices reduces average deployment time and continuous integration.

In this paper, we address a key challenge of managing required bandwidth for traffic flows in Industrial cyber-physical systems (ICPS). To manage the required bandwidth and to improve fault-resilience in such Industrial networks, software-defined networks (SDN) are used. We propose a contract-based framework with the use of SDN where the components are bound to bandwidth-contracts and a resilience manager. The bandwidth-contracts state the bandwidth requirements of the traffic flows. Based on the newly calculated routes, an observer detects whether the contract still satisfies the bandwidth requirements of the traffic flows or the contract gets violated (termed as fault). To provide resilience to such faults in the network, a resilience manager integrated with control logic, decides and executes a suitable response strategy (depending upon the severity of the fault). The proposed framework is evaluated using Ryu SDN controller on hardware testbed. Different tests on the hardware testbed depict that the proposed framework provides enhanced network resilience as compared to the base-line mechanisms. Besides, our extensive experimental emulations are carried out on the Mininet SDN tool for testing the scalability of the proposed framework.

The next generation of communication technology is accelerating the transformation of industrial internet of things (IIoT). Filter bank multicarrier with offset quadrature amplitude modulation (FBMC/OQAM), as a candidate wireless transmission technology for beyond fifth generation (5G), has been widely concerned by researchers. However, effective channel estimation (CE) in IIoT communication should be solved. In practice, wireless channels have block–sparse structures. For the conventional sparse channel model, the general sparse channel estimation methods do not take the potential block–sparse structure information into account. In this paper, we have investigated the sparse Bayesian learning (SBL) framework for sparse multipath CE in FBMC/OQAM communications. Block SBL (BSBL) algorithm is proposed to estimate the channel performance by exploiting the block–sparse structure of sparse multipath channel model. The BSBL method can improve the estimation performance by using the block correlation of the training matrix. Computer simulation results demonstrate the robustness of the BSBL CE approach in FBMC/OQAM systems, which can achieve lower mean square error (MSE) and bit error rate (BER) than traditional least squares (LS) method and classical compressive sensing methods. The state of art compressive sampling matching pursuit (CoSaMP) greedy algorithm with a prior knowledge of sparse degree can provide slightly better CE performance than BSBL algorithm, but the proposed method maintains robustness in practical channel scenario without the prior knowledge of sparse degree.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has rapidly progressed in recent years and immensely influenced many industries in how they operate. Consequently, IoT technology has improved productivity in many sectors, and smart farming has also hugely benefited from the IoT. Smart farming enables precision agriculture, high crop yield, and the efficient utilization of natural resources to sustain for a longer time. Smart farming includes sensing capabilities, communication technologies to transmit the collected data from the sensors, and data analytics to extract meaningful information from the collected data. These modules will enable farmers to make intelligent decisions and gain profits. However, incorporating new technologies includes inheriting security and privacy consequences if they are not implemented in a secure manner, and smart farming is not an exception. Therefore, security monitoring is an essential component to be implemented for smart farming. In this paper, we propose a cloud-enabled smart-farm security monitoring framework to monitor device status and sensor anomalies effectively and mitigate security attacks using behavioral patterns. Additionally, a blockchain-based smart-contract application was implemented to securely store security-anomaly information and proactively mitigate similar attacks targeting other farms in the community. We implemented the security-monitoring-framework prototype for smart farms using Arduino Sensor Kit, ESP32, AWS cloud, and the smart contract on the Ethereum Rinkeby Test Network and evaluated network latency to monitor and respond to security events. The performance evaluation of the proposed framework showed that our solution could detect security anomalies within real-time processing time and update the other farm nodes to be aware of the situation.

With the evolution of the Internet of Things (IoT), smart cities have become the mainstream of urbanization. IoT networks allow distributed smart devices to collect and process data within smart city infrastructure using an open channel, the Internet. Thus, challenges such as centralization, security, privacy (e.g., performing data poisoning and inference attacks), transparency, scalability, and verifiability limits faster adaptations of smart cities. Motivated by the aforementioned discussions, we present a Privacy-Preserving and Secure Framework (PPSF) for IoT-driven smart cities. The proposed PPSF is based on two key mechanisms: a two-level privacy scheme and an intrusion detection scheme. First, in a two-level privacy scheme, a blockchain module is designed to securely transmit the IoT data and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) technique is applied to transform raw IoT information into a new shape. In the intrusion detection scheme, a Gradient Boosting Anomaly Detector (GBAD) is applied for training and evaluating the proposed two-level privacy scheme based on two IoT network datasets, namely ToN-IoT and BoT-IoT. We also suggest a blockchain-InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) integrated Fog-Cloud architecture to deploy the proposed PPSF framework. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the PPSF framework over some recent approaches in blockchain and non-blockchain systems.

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are comprised of multiple sensor nodes deployed in an ad-hoc manner to sense or observe physical phenomena by collecting real-time data. These sensor nodes are battery-enabled with limited energy constraints affecting network lifetime. Energy conservation of these nodes is vital in designing a routing protocol to maximize network lifetime. Heterogeneity of the network plays an important role in prolonging the network lifetime by making use of dissimilar nodes in terms of energy, power, and processing capabilities. In this paper, a hybrid approach, named as Distance Aware Residual Energy-Efficient Stable Election Protocol (DARE-SEP) , is proposed that combines features of Residual Energy Efficient Stable Election Protocol (REE-SEP) with Direct Transmission (DT) and Distance-Based protocol (DP). The proposed protocol is aimed to provide an optimal transmission route from sensor nodes to the Cluster Heads (CHs), considering the network dynamics. Multi-hop routing is used between CHs and sinks nodes to reduce energy consumption. The results show a 10% increase in energy efficiency, thus enhancing the network lifespan compared with the conventional routing protocols in Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks (HWSNs).

Copyright infringement adversely affects the interest of copyright holders of images and videos which are uploaded to different websites and peer-to-peer image sharing systems. This paper addresses the problem of detecting copyright infringement so that copyright holders are given due credit for their work. There are several images and videos that are shared every day by millions of users with some amount of modification in images and videos originally uploaded by the copyright holders such as photographers, graphic designers, and video providers. Copyright violators, who are not the original creators of multimedia content modify them using image processing and frame modification techniques such as grayscale conversion, cropping, rotation, frame compression, and frame speed manipulation. Then, upload the tampered images and videos. To address this problem, we propose an IPFS-based (InterPlanetary File System-based) decentralized peer-to-peer image and video sharing platform built on blockchain technology. We use a perceptual hash (pHash) technique to detect copyright violations of multimedia. When multimedia is to be uploaded to the IPFS, the pHash of the same content is determined and checked against existing pHash values in the blockchain network. Similarity with existing pHash values would result in the multimedia being detected as tampered with. Blockchain technology offers the advantage of non-involvement of a third party and consequently the avoidance of a single point of failure.

International audience; The Internet of Things (IoT) has remarkably evolved over the last few years to realize a wide range of newly emerging services and applications empowered by the unprecedented proliferation of smart devices. The quality of IoT networks heavily relies on the involvement of devices for undertaking functions from data sensing, computation to communication and IoT intelligence. Stimulating IoT devices to actively participate and contribute to the network is a practical challenge, where incentive techniques such as blockchain, game theory, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are highly desirable to build a sustainable IoT ecosystem. In this article, we present a systematic literature review of the incentive techniques for IoT, aiming to provide general readers with an overview of incentive-enabled IoT from background, motivations, and enabling techniques. Particularly, we first present the fundamentals of IoT data network infrastructure, and several key incentive techniques for IoT are described in details, including blockchain, game theory, and AI. We next provide an extensive review on the use of these incentive techniques in a number of key IoT services, such as IoT data sharing, IoT data offloading and caching, IoT mobile crowdsensing, and IoT security and privacy. Subsequently, we explore the potential of incentives in important IoT applications, ranging from smart healthcare, smart transportation to smart city and smart industry. The research challenges of incentive techniques in IoT networks are highlighted, and the potential directions are also pointed out for future research of this important area.

The emergence of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) has enhanced the lives of humans and envisioned the concept of smart cities using informed actions, enhanced user interpretations and explanations, and firm decision-making processes. The XAI systems can unbox the potential of black-box AI models and describe them explicitly. The study comprehensively surveys the current and future developments in XAI technologies for smart cities. It also highlights the societal, industrial, and technological trends that initiate the drive towards XAI for smart cities. It presents the key to enabling XAI technologies for smart cities in detail. The paper also discusses the concept of XAI for smart cities, various XAI technology use cases, challenges, applications, possible alternative solutions, and current and future research enhancements. Research projects and activities, including standardization efforts toward developing XAI for smart cities, are outlined in detail. The lessons learned from state-of-the-art research are summarized, and various technical challenges are discussed to shed new light on future research possibilities. The presented study on XAI for smart cities is a first-of-its-kind, rigorous, and detailed study to assist future researchers in implementing XAI-driven systems, architectures, and applications for smart cities.

Smart contracts powered by blockchain ensure transaction processes are effective, secure and efficient as compared to conventional contacts. Smart contracts facilitate trustless process, time efficiency, cost effectiveness and transparency without any intervention by third party intermediaries like lawyers. While blockchain can counter traditional cybersecurity attacks on smart contract applications, cyberattacks keep evolving in the form of new threats and attack vectors that influence blockchain similar to other web and application based systems. Effective blockchain testing help organizations to build and utilize the technology securely withe connected infrastructure. However, during the course of our research, the authors detected that Blockchain technology comes with security considerations like irreversible transactions, insufficient access, and non-competent strategies. Attack vectors, like these are not found on web portals and other applications. This research presents a new Penetration Testing framework for smart contracts and decentralized apps. The authors compared results from the proposed penetration-testing framework with automated penetration test Scanners. The results detected missing vulnerability that were not reported during regular pen test process.

The smart applications dominating the planet in the present day and age, have innovatively progressed to deploy Internet of Things (IoT) based systems and related infrastructures in all spectrums of life. Since, variety of applications are being developed using this IoT paradigm, there is an immense necessity for storing data, processing them to get meaningful information and render suitable services to the end-users. The “thing” in this decade is not only a smart sensor or a device; it can be any physical or household object, a smart device or a mobile. With the ever increasing rise in population and smart device usage in every sphere of life, when all of such “thing”s generates data, there is a chance of huge data traffic in the internet. This could be handled only by integrating “Internet of Everything (IoE)” paradigm with a completely diversified technology — Cloud Computing. In order to handle this heavy flow of data traffic and process the same to generate meaningful information, various services in the global environment are utilized. Hence the primary focus revolves in integrating these two diversified paradigm shifts to develop intelligent information processing systems. Energy Efficient Cloud Based Internet of Everything (EECloudIoE) architecture is proposed in this study, which acts as an initial step in integrating these two wide areas thereby providing valuable services to the end users. The utilization of energy is optimized by clustering the various IoT network using Wind Driven Optimization Algorithm. Next, an optimized Cluster Head (CH) is chosen for each cluster, using Firefly Algorithm resulting in reduced data traffic in comparison to other non-clustering schemes. The proposed clustering of IoE is further compared with the widely used state of the art techniques like Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm, Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Adaptive Gravitational Search algorithm (AGSA). The results justify the superiority of the proposed methodology outperforming the existing approaches with an increased life-time and reduction in traffic.

The entire computing paradigm is changed due to the technological advancements in Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Due to these advancements, various new communication channels are being introduced, out of which the Internet of Things (IoT) plays a significant role. The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is a special category of IoT in which the medical devices communicate with each other for sharing sensitive data. These advancements help the healthcare industry to have better contact and care towards their patients. But they too have certain drawbacks since there are so many security and privacy issues like replay, man-in-the-middle, impersonation, privileged-insider, remote hijacking, password guessing, denial of service (DoS) attacks and malware attacks. When the sensitive data is being attacked by any of these attacks, there is a chance of losing the authorized data to the attacker or getting altered due to which the data is not available for the authorized users and customers. Machine learning algorithms are widely used in the Intrusion Detection System (IDS) for detecting and classifying the attacks at the network and host level in a dynamic manner. Many supervised and unsupervised algorithms have been designed by researchers from the area of machine learning and data mining to identify the reliable detection of an anomaly. However, the main challenge in the IDS models are changed in dynamic and random behavior of malicious attacks and designing a scalable solution that can handle this behavior. The rapid change in network behavior and the fast evolution of various attacks paved the way for evaluating various datasets that are generated over the years and to design different dynamic approaches. In this paper, a deep neural network (DNN) is used to develop effective and efficient IDS in the IoMT environment to classify and predict unforeseen cyberattacks. The network parameter are preprocessed, optimized and tuned by hyperparameter selection methods. A comprehensive analysis of experiments in DNN with other machine learning algorithms are compared on the benchmark intrusion detection dataset. Through rigorous testing, it has proved that the proposed DNN model performs better than the existing machine learning approaches with an increase in accuracy by 15% and decreases in time complexity by 32%, which helps in faster alerts to avoid post effects of intrusion in sensitive cloud data storage.

There has been a huge surge in the Internet of Things (IoT) applications in recent years. The sensor nodes in the IoT network generate data continuously that directly affects the longevity of the network. Even though the potential of IoT applications are immense, there are numerous challenges like security, privacy, load balancing, storage, heterogeneity of devices, and energy optimization that have to be addressed. Of those, the energy utilization of the network is of importance and has to be optimized. Several factors like residual energy, temperature, the load of Cluster Head (CH), number of alive nodes, and cost function affect the energy consumption of sensor nodes. In this paper, a hybrid Whale Optimization Algorithm-Moth Flame Optimization (MFO) is designed to select optimal CH, which in turn optimizes the aforementioned factors. The performance of the proposed work is then evaluated with existing algorithms with respect to the energy-specific factors. The results obtained prove that the proposed method outperforms existing approaches.

Deep generative models, such as deep Boltzmann machines, focused on models that provided parametric specification of probability distribution functions. Such models are trained by maximizing intractable likelihood functions, and therefore require numerous approximations to the likelihood gradient. This underlying difficulty led to the development of generative machines such as generative stochastic networks, which do not represent the likelihood functions explicitly, like the earlier models, but are trained with exact backpropagation rather than the numerous approximations. These models use piecewise linear units that are having well behaved gradients. Generative machines were further extended with the introduction of an associative adversarial network leading to the generative adversarial nets (GANs) model by Goodfellow in 2014. The estimations in GANs process two multilayer perceptrons, called the generative model and the discriminative model. These are learned jointly by alternating the training of the two models, using game theory principles. However, GAN has many difficulties, including: the difficulty of training the models; criticality in the selection of hyper-parameters; difficulty in the control of generated samples; balancing the convergence of the discriminator and generator; and the problem of modal collapse. Since its inception, efforts have been made to tackle these issues one at a time or in multiples at several stages by many researchers. However, most of these have been handled efficiently in the boundary equilibrium generative adversarial networks (BEGAN) model introduced by Berthelot et al. in 2017. In this work we presented the advent of adversarial networks, starting with the history behind the models and c developments done on GANs until the BEGAN model was introduced. Since some time has elapsed since the proposal of BEGAN, we provided an up-to-date study, as well as future directions for various aspects of adversarial learning.

INTRODUCTION: Fiber laser communication is a communication method that uses laser and fiber medium to realize data transmission and information output OBJECTIVES: In order to reduce the signal interference of optical fiber communication laser interface and ensure the communication quality of optical fiber network. A filtering method of optical fiber communication laser interface interference signal based on digital filtering technology is designed. METHODS: In this paper, the interface model of optical fiber communication network is firstly constructed, and the interface noise signal is input into the digital filter bank. The digital quadrature filtering method and the least square algorithm are used to separate the denoised signals to reduce the crosstalk between the signals in the channel. In this way, the crosstalk component in the signal can be filtered out, and a better filtering processing effect of the laser interface interference signal can be achieved. RESULTS: The results of peak signal-to-noise ratio are above 25, which effectively filters the interference signal in the signal, and retains the effective signal completely. The intelligibility of optical fiber communication network in signal communication is above 0.94, and the highest value is 0.986. The distortion degree are all below 0.025, and the minimum value is 0.004. The communication bit error rate are all below 0.001, which ensures the communication quality of the network. CONCLUSION: The experimental results show that the signal noise reduction effect of the proposed method is good, which provides a reliable basis for filtering and separating interference signals of optical fiber communication laser interface.

In recent years, blockchain networks have attracted significant attention in many research areas beyond cryptocurrency, one of them being the Edge of Things (EoT) that is enabled by the combination of edge computing and the Internet of Things (IoT). In this context, blockchain networks enabled with unique features such as decentralization, immutability, and traceability, have the potential to reshape and transform the conventional EoT systems with higher security levels. Particularly, the convergence of blockchain and EoT leads to a new paradigm, called BEoT that has been regarded as a promising enabler for future services and applications. In this paper, we present a state-of-the-art review of recent developments in BEoT technology and discover its great opportunities in many application domains. We start our survey by providing an updated introduction to blockchain and EoT along with their recent advances. Subsequently, we discuss the use of BEoT in a wide range of industrial applications, from smart transportation, smart city, smart healthcare to smart home and smart grid. Security challenges in BEoT paradigm are also discussed and analyzed, with some key services such as access authentication, data privacy preservation, attack detection, and trust management. Finally, some key research challenges and future directions are also highlighted to instigate further research in this promising area., The paper is accepted for publication in IEEE IoTJ

In today’s society, voting is crucial to choosing the representatives of the people. The current voting process is filled with a vast array of disputes and manipulations. The leader must be selected in a precise manner without any malpractices. In addition, the people and authorities are not happy with the election results and label them unpredictable. We offer a better solution to the current problems, such as tampering, non-residents voting outside of the polling place, quick results analysis, quick counting, and reduced use of staff and funds during the electoral franchise process. In this offer, blockchain technology is used to create the distributed application (dApp) framework that will be used for the proposed e-voting system. Additionally, it offers unique characteristics such as immutability, transparency, privacy, and reception freedom that reduce crimes involving the processing of sensitive data in the electoral process. Ganache, MetaMask, and specified dagger hashing algorithm are used to develop the dApp. A key strength of this paper is the statistical analysis of transactions on the blockchain. Moreover, it also provides security to voters’ identity and leads to immediate acceptable counting results with more accuracy.

The rapid development of the Internet and smart devices trigger surge in network traffic making its infrastructure more complex and heterogeneous. The predominated usage of mobile phones, wearable devices and autonomous vehicles are examples of distributed networks which generate huge amount of data each and every day. The computational power of these devices have also seen steady progression which has created the need to transmit information, store data locally and drive network computations towards edge devices. Intrusion detection systems play a significant role in ensuring security and privacy of such devices. Machine Learning and Deep Learning with Intrusion Detection Systems have gained great momentum due to their achievement of high classification accuracy. However the privacy and security aspects potentially gets jeopardised due to the need of storing and communicating data to centralized server. On the contrary, federated learning (FL) fits in appropriately as a privacy-preserving decentralized learning technique that does not transfer data but trains models locally and transfers the parameters to the centralized server. The present paper aims to present an extensive and exhaustive review on the use of FL in intrusion detection system. In order to establish the need for FL, various types of IDS, relevant ML approaches and its associated issues are discussed. The paper presents detailed overview of the implementation of FL in various aspects of anomaly detection. The allied challenges of FL implementations are also identified which provides idea on the scope of future direction of research. The paper finally presents the plausible solutions associated with the identified challenges in FL based intrusion detection system implementation acting as a baseline for prospective research., Comment: Submitted to JNCA, Elsevier

Diabetic Retinopathy is a major cause of vision loss and blindness affecting millions of people across the globe. Although there are established screening methods - fluorescein angiography and optical coherence tomography for detection of the disease but in majority of the cases, the patients remain ignorant and fail to undertake such tests at an appropriate time. The early detection of the disease plays an extremely important role in preventing vision loss which is the consequence of diabetes mellitus remaining untreated among patients for a prolonged time period. Various machine learning and deep learning approaches have been implemented on diabetic retinopathy dataset for classification and prediction of the disease but majority of them have neglected the aspect of data pre-processing and dimensionality reduction, leading to biased results. The dataset used in the present study is a diabetes retinopathy dataset collected from the UCI machine learning repository. At its inceptions, the raw dataset is normalized using the Standardscalar technique and then Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is used to extract the most significant features in the dataset. Further, Firefly algorithm is implemented for dimensionality reduction. This reduced dataset is fed into a Deep Neural Network Model for classification. The results generated from the model is evaluated against the prevalent machine learning models and the results justify the superiority of the proposed model in terms of Accuracy, Precision, Recall, Sensitivity and Specificity.

The enormous popularity of the internet across all spheres of human life has introduced various risks of malicious attacks in the network. The activities performed over the network could be effortlessly proliferated, which has led to the emergence of intrusion detection systems. The patterns of the attacks are also dynamic, which necessitates efficient classification and prediction of cyber attacks. In this paper we propose a hybrid principal component analysis (PCA)-firefly based machine learning model to classify intrusion detection system (IDS) datasets. The dataset used in the study is collected from Kaggle. The model first performs One-Hot encoding for the transformation of the IDS datasets. The hybrid PCA-firefly algorithm is then used for dimensionality reduction. The XGBoost algorithm is implemented on the reduced dataset for classification. A comprehensive evaluation of the model is conducted with the state of the art machine learning approaches to justify the superiority of our proposed approach. The experimental results confirm the fact that the proposed model performs better than the existing machine learning models.

Big data has generated strong interest in various scientific and engineering domains over the last few years. Despite many advantages and applications, there are many challenges in big data to be tackled for better quality of service, e.g., big data analytics, big data management, and big data privacy and security. Blockchain with its decentralization and security nature has the great potential to improve big data services and applications. In this article, we provide a comprehensive survey on blockchain for big data, focusing on up-to-date approaches, opportunities, and future directions. First, we present a brief overview of blockchain and big data as well as the motivation behind their integration. Next, we survey various blockchain services for big data, including blockchain for secure big data acquisition, data storage, data analytics, and data privacy preservation. Then, we review the state-of-the-art studies on the use of blockchain for big data applications in different vertical domains such as smart city, smart healthcare, smart transportation, and smart grid. For a better understanding, some representative blockchain-big data projects are also presented and analyzed. Finally, challenges and future directions are discussed to further drive research in this promising area.

The current advancement in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and the proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT) devices is revolutionizing conventional farming operations into precision agriculture. The agricultural UAVs combined with IoT use an open channel i.e., the Internet to assist cultivators with data collection, processing, monitoring, and making correct decisions on the farm. However, the use of the Internet opens up a wide range of challenges such as security (e.g., performing cyber-attacks), risk of data privacy (e.g., data poisoning and inference attacks), etc. The usage of current conventional centralized security measures has limitations in terms of a single point of failure, verifiability, traceability, and scalability. Motivated from the aforementioned challenges, we propose a Secured Privacy-Preserving Framework (SP2F) for smart agricultural UAVs. The proposed SP2F framework has two main engines, a two-level privacy engine, and a deep learning-based anomaly detection engine. In the two-level privacy engine, a blockchain, and smart contract-based enhanced Proof of Work (ePoW) is designed for data authentication, and to mitigate data poisoning attacks. A Sparse AutoEncoder (SAE) is applied for transforming data into a new encoded format for preventing inference attacks. In the anomaly detection engine, a Stacked Long-Short-Term Memory (SLSTM) is used to train and evaluate the results of the proposed two-level privacy engine using two publicly accessible IoT-based datasets, namely ToN-IoT and IoT Botnet. Finally, based on thorough analysis, and comparison, we identify that the SP2F framework outperforms several state-of-the-art techniques in both non-blockchain and blockchain frameworks.

The utility of virtual circuit (VC) based devices - UAVs, Drones, and similar other IoT based devices have gained immense momentum in the present day and age. These devices are predominantly used for aerial surveying in sensitive and remote areas. It is alarming that issues pertaining to stalking and information control have increased with the growth of technology. This paper presents a Blockchain Technology (BCT) based solution to improve the security and privacy of VC based device data. The proposed design is evaluated by implementing an IoT based application in a virtual vehicle monitoring system. The technical information about the instructions to the vehicle (devices), authentication, integrity, and vehicle reactions are stored in a cloud platform wherein Pentatope based Elliptic curve cryptography and SHA are used to ensure privacy in data storage. The data is later stored in an Ethereum based public blockchain to enable seamless BCT transactions. This system uses the Ganache platform for BCT that ensures data protection and privacy. Furthermore, metamask wallet for E t h balance is required to perform transactions over BCT. The proposed methodology thus helps to protect data from stalkers, plaintext attacks as well as ciphertext attacks. The results, when compared with the state-of-the-art, justify the efficiency and security aspects of the proposed approach.