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Abstract The Australian healthcare sector is a complex mix of government departments, associations, providers, professionals, and consumers. Cybersecurity attacks, which have recently increased, challenge the sector in many ways; however, the best approaches for the sector to manage the threat are unclear. This study will report on a semi-structured focus group conducted with five representatives from the Australian healthcare and computer security sectors. An analysis of this focus group transcript yielded four themes: 1) the challenge of securing the Australian healthcare landscape; 2) the financial challenges of cybersecurity in healthcare; 3) balancing privacy and transparency; 4) education and regulation. The results indicate the need for sector-specific tools to empower the healthcare sector to mitigate cybersecurity threats, most notably using a self-evaluation tool so stakeholders can proactively prepare for incidents. Despite the vast amount of research into cybersecurity, little has been conducted on proactive cybersecurity approaches where security weaknesses are identified weaknesses before they occur.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has recently attracted much interest from researchers due to its diverse IoT applications. However, IoT systems encounter additional security and privacy threats. Developing an efficient IoT system is challenging because of its sophisticated network topology. Effective access control is required to ensure user privacy in the Internet of Things. Traditional access control methods are inappropriate for IoT systems because most conventional access control approaches are designed for centralized systems. This paper proposes a decentralized access control framework based on smart contracts with three parts: initialization, an access control protocol, and an inspection. Smart contracts are used in the proposed framework to store access control policies safely on the blockchain. The framework also penalizes users for attempting unauthorized access to the IoT resources. The smart contract was developed using Remix and deployed on the Ropsten Ethereum testnet. We analyze the performance of the smart contract-based access policies based on the gas consumption of blockchain transactions. Further, we analyze the system’s security, usability, scalability, and interoperability performance.

The smart grid accessibility over the Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming attractive to electrical grid operators as it brings considerable operational and cost efficiencies. However, this in return creates significant cyber security challenges, such as fortification of state estimation data such as state variables against false data injection attacks (FDIAs). In this paper, a clustered partitioning state estimation (CPSE) technique is proposed to detect FDIA by using static state estimation, namely, weighted least square (WLS) method in conjunction with dynamic state estimation using minimum variance unscented Kalman filter (MV-UKF) which improves the accuracy of state estimation. The estimates acquired from the MV-UKF do not deviate like WLS as these are purely based on the previous iteration saved in the transition matrix. The deviation between the corresponding estimations of WLS and MV-UKF are utilised to partition the smart grid into smaller sub-systems to detect FDIA and then identify its location. To validate the proposed detection technique, FIDAs are injected into IEEE 14-bus, IEEE 30-bus, IEEE 118-bus, and IEEE 300-bus distribution feeder using MATPOWER simulation platform. Our results clearly demonstrate that the proposed technique can locate the attack area efficiently compared to other techniques such as chi square.

This paper reviews the state-of-the-art multi-sensor fusion approaches applicable in the next-generation intelligent transportation systems where connected vehicles are cooperatively driven for maximum safety and efficiency. The review finds out that complementary sensor fusion in a time-varying distributed network is required, and for such applications, the state-of-the-art is sensor fusion in the random finite set filtering framework. The fundamental bases of random finite set filters are reviewed with more elaboration on a particular filter called the Labeled Multi-Bernoulli filter. An information-theoretic approach for data fusion based on minimizing information divergence between statistical densities is presented, along with how different divergence functions can be used for sensor fusion. Different approaches are evaluated for their tracking performance and computational cost in a realistic simulation scenario. Their advantages, and disadvantages in the context of real-time implementation in a connected driving scenario are discussed.

Conventional Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems involve data streaming from sensors, through Fog devices to a centralized Cloud server. Issues that arise include privacy concerns due to third party management of Cloud servers, single points of failure, a bottleneck in data flows and difficulties in regularly updating firmware for millions of smart devices from a point of security and maintenance perspective. Blockchain technologies avoid trusted third parties and safeguard against a single point of failure and other issues. This has inspired researchers to investigate blockchain’s adoption into IoT ecosystem. In this paper, recent state-of-the-arts advances in blockchain for IoT, blockchain for Cloud IoT and blockchain for Fog IoT in the context of eHealth, smart cities, intelligent transport and other applications are analyzed. Obstacles, research gaps and potential solutions are also presented.

Abstract Cyber-attacks are becoming more sophisticated and thereby presenting increasing challenges in accurately detecting intrusions. Failure to prevent the intrusions could degrade the credibility of security services, e.g. data confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Numerous intrusion detection methods have been proposed in the literature to tackle computer security threats, which can be broadly classified into Signature-based Intrusion Detection Systems (SIDS) and Anomaly-based Intrusion Detection Systems (AIDS). This survey paper presents a taxonomy of contemporary IDS, a comprehensive review of notable recent works, and an overview of the datasets commonly used for evaluation purposes. It also presents evasion techniques used by attackers to avoid detection and discusses future research challenges to counter such techniques so as to make computer systems more secure.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has facilitated services without human intervention for a wide range of applications, including continuous remote patient monitoring (RPM). However, the complexity of RPM architectures, the size of data sets generated and limited power capacity of devices make RPM challenging. In this paper, we propose a tier-based End to End architecture for continuous patient monitoring that has a patient centric agent (PCA) as its center piece. The PCA manages a blockchain component to preserve privacy when data streaming from body area sensors needs to be stored securely. The PCA based architecture includes a lightweight communication protocol to enforce security of data through different segments of a continuous, real time patient monitoring architecture. The architecture includes the insertion of data into a personal blockchain to facilitate data sharing amongst healthcare professionals and integration into electronic health records while ensuring privacy is maintained. The blockchain is customized for RPM with modifications that include having the PCA select a Miner to reduce computational effort, enabling the PCA to manage multiple blockchains for the same patient, and the modification of each block with a prefix tree to minimize energy consumption and incorporate secure transaction payments. Simulation results demonstrate that security and privacy can be enhanced in RPM with the PCA based End to End architecture.

Synchronous movement of attached self-lifting scaffolds is traditionally monitored with wired sensors in high-rise building construction, which limits their flexibility of movements. A ZigBee-based wireless sensor system has been suggested in this article to prove the effectiveness of wireless sensor networks in actual implementation. Two optoelectronic sensors are integrated into a ZigBee node for measuring the displacement of attached self-lifting scaffolds. The proposed wireless sensor network combines an end device and a coordinator to allow easy replacement of sensors as compared to a wired network. A wake-up timer algorithm is proposed to reduce the transmitting power during continuous wireless data communication in the wireless sensor network. Furthermore, a variant binary exponential backoff transmission algorithm for data loss avoidance is proposed. The variant binary exponential backoff algorithm reduces packet collisions during simultaneous access by increasing the randomizing moments at nodes attempting to access the wireless channels. The performance of three of the proposed modules—a cable sensor, a 315-MHz sensor, and a ZigBee sensor—is evaluated in terms of packet delivery ratio and the end-to-end delay of a ZigBee-based wireless sensor network. The experimental results show that the proposed variant binary exponential backoff transmission algorithm achieves a higher packet delivery ratio at the cost of higher delays. The average cost of the developed ZigBee-based wireless sensor network decreased by 24% compared with the cable sensor. The power consumption of ZigBee is approximately 53.75% of the 315-MHz sensor. The average current consumption is reduced by approximately 1.5 mA with the wake-up timer algorithm at the same sampling rate.