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Advanced metering infrastructures (AMIs) aim to enhance the efficiency, reliability, and stability of electrical systems while offering advanced functionality. However, an AMI collects copious volumes of data and information, making the entire system sensitive and vulnerable to malicious attacks that may cause substantial damage, such as a deficit in national security, a disturbance of public order, or significant economic harm. As a result, it is critical to guarantee a steady and dependable supply of information and electricity. Furthermore, storing massive quantities of data in one central entity leads to compromised data privacy. As such, it is imperative to engineer decentralized, federated learning (FL) solutions. In this context, the performance of participating clients has a significant impact on global performance. Moreover, FL models have the potential for a Single Point of Failure (SPoF). These limitations contribute to system failure and performance degradation. This work aims to develop a performance-based hierarchical federated learning (HFL) anomaly detection system for an AMI through (1) developing a deep learning model that detects attacks against this critical infrastructure; (2) developing a novel aggregation strategy, FedAvg-P, to enhance global performance; and (3) proposing a peer-to-peer architecture guarding against a SPoF. The proposed system was employed in experiments on the CIC-IDS2017 dataset. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed system can be used to develop a reliable anomaly detection system for AMI networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is one of the critical emerging applications of the Internet of Things (IoT). The huge increases in data generation and transmission across distributed networks make security one of the most important challenges facing IoMT networks. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks impact the availability of services of legitimate users. Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) that are based on Centralized Learning (CL) suffer from high training time and communication overhead. IDS that are based on distributed learning, such as Federated Learning (FL) or Split Learning (SL), are recently used for intrusion detection. FL preserves data privacy while enabling collaborative model development. However, FL suffers from high training time and communication overhead. On the other hand, SL offers advantages in terms of computational resources, but it faces challenges such as communication overhead and potential security vulnerabilities at the split point. Federated Split Learning (FSL) has proposed overcoming the problems of both FL and SL and offering more secure, efficient, and scalable distribution systems. This paper proposes a novel distributed FSL (DFSL) system to detect DDoS attacks. The proposed DFSL enhances detection accuracy and reduces training time by designing an adaptive aggregation method based on the early stopping strategy. However, the increased number of clients leads to increasing communication overheads. We further propose a Multi-Node Selection (MNS) based Best Channel-Best l 2 -Norm (BC-BN2) selection scheme to reduce communication overhead. Two DL models are used to test the effectiveness of the proposed system, including a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and CNN with Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) on two modern datasets. The performance of the proposed system is compared with three baseline distributed approaches such as FedAvg, Vanilla SL, and SplitFed algorithms. The proposed system outperforms the baseline algorithms with an accuracy of 99.70% and 99.87% in CICDDoS2019 and LITNET-2020 datasets, respectively. The proposed system's training time and communication overhead are 30% and 20% less than the baseline algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today, various applications in different domains increasingly rely on high-performance computing (HPC) to accomplish computations swiftly. Integrating one or more programming models alongside the used programming language enhances system parallelism, thereby improving its performance. However, this integration can introduce runtime errors such as race conditions, deadlocks, or livelocks. Some of these errors may go undetected using conventional testing techniques, necessitating the exploration of additional methods for enhanced reliability. Formal methods, such as temporal logic, can be useful for detecting runtime errors since they have been widely used in real-time systems. Additionally, many software systems must adhere to temporal properties to ensure correct functionality. Temporal logics indeed serve as a formal frame that takes into account the temporal aspect when describing changes in elements or states over time. This paper proposes a temporal-logic-based testing tool utilizing instrumentation techniques designed for a dual-level programming model, namely, Message Passing Interface (MPI) and Open Multi-Processing (OpenMP), integrated with the C++ programming language. After a comprehensive study of temporal logic types, we found and proved that linear temporal logic is well suited as the foundation for our tool. Notably, while the tool is currently in development, our approach is poised to effectively address the highlighted examples of runtime errors by the proposed solution. This paper thoroughly explores various types and operators of temporal logic to inform the design of the testing tool based on temporal properties, aiming for a robust and reliable system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Featured Application: A potential application of interest involves applications that can tolerate some level of inconsistency, such as routing or load-balancing applications. The Physically Distributed Logically Centralized (PDLC) software-defined network (SDN) control plane is physically dispersed across several controllers with a global network view for performance, scalability, and fault tolerance. This design, providing control applications with a global network view, necessitates network state synchronization among controllers. The amount of inter-controller synchronization can affect the performance and scalability of the system. The absence of standardized communication protocols for East-bound SDN interfaces underscores the need for high-performance communication among diverse SDN controllers to maintain consistent state exchange. An inconsistent controller's network view can significantly impact network effectiveness and application performance, particularly in dynamic networks. This survey paper offers an overview of noteworthy AI and non-AI solutions for PDLC SDN architecture in industry and academia, specifically focusing on their approaches to consistency and synchronization challenges. The suggested PDLC framework achieves an adaptive controller-to-controller synchronization rate in a dynamic network environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]