Anomaly Detection for Industrial Internet of Things Cyberattacks

The evolution of the Internet of Things (IoT) has empowered modern industries with the capability to implement large-scale IoT ecosystems, such as the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). The IIoT is vulnerable to a diverse range of cyberattacks that can be exploited by intruders and cause substantial reputational and financial harm to organizations. To preserve the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of IIoT networks, an anomaly-based intrusion detection system (IDS) can be used to provide secure, reliable, and efficient IIoT ecosystems. In this paper, we propose an anomaly-based IDS for IIoT networks as an effective security solution to efficiently and effectively overcome several IIoT cyberattacks. The proposed anomaly-based IDS is divided into three phases: pre-processing, feature selection, and classification. In the pre-processing phase, data cleaning and normalization are performed. In the feature selection phase, the candidates’ feature vectors are computed using two feature reduction techniques, minimum redundancy maximum relevance and neighborhood components analysis. For the final step, the modeling phase, the following classifiers are used to perform the classification: support vector machine, decision tree, k-nearest neighbors, and linear discriminant analysis. The proposed work uses a new data-driven IIoT data set called X-IIoTID. The experimental evaluation demonstrates our proposed model achieved a high accuracy rate of 99.58%, a sensitivity rate of 99.59%, a specificity rate of 99.58%, and a low false positive rate of 0.4%.     

Discrete GWO Optimized Data Aggregation for Reducing Transmission Rate in IoT

The conventional hospital environment is transformed into digital transformation that focuses on patient centric remote approach through advanced technologies. Early diagnosis of many diseases will improve the patient life. The cost of health care systems is reduced due to the use of advanced technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT), Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), Embedded systems, Deep learning approaches and Optimization and aggregation methods. The data generated through these technologies will demand the bandwidth, data rate, latency of the network. In this proposed work, efficient discrete grey wolf optimization (DGWO) based data aggregation scheme using Elliptic curve Elgamal with Message Authentication code (ECEMAC) has been used to aggregate the parameters generated from the wearable sensor devices of the patient. The nodes that are far away from edge node will forward the data to its neighbor cluster head using DGWO. Aggregation scheme will reduce the number of transmissions over the network. The aggregated data are preprocessed at edge node to remove the noise for better diagnosis. Edge node will reduce the overhead of cloud server. The aggregated data are forward to cloud server for central storage and diagnosis. This proposed smart diagnosis will reduce the transmission cost through aggregation scheme which will reduce the energy of the system. Energy cost for proposed system for 300 nodes is 0.34μJ. Various energy cost of existing approaches such as secure privacy preserving data aggregation scheme (SPPDA), concealed data aggregation scheme for multiple application (CDAMA) and secure aggregation scheme (ASAS) are 1.3 μJ, 0.81 μJ and 0.51 μJ respectively. The optimization approaches and encryption method will ensure the data privacy.     

A Multi-Stage Secure IoT Authentication Protocol

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a network of heterogeneous and smart devices that can make decisions without human intervention. It can connect millions of devices across the universe. Their ability to collect information, perform analysis, and even come to meaningful conclusions without human capital intervention matters. Such circumstances require stringent security measures and, in particular, the extent of authentication. Systems applied in the IoT paradigm point out high-interest levels since enormous damage will occur if a malicious, wrongly authenticated device finds its way into the IoT system. This research provides a clear and updated view of the trends in the IoT authentication area. Among the issues covered include a series of authentication protocols that have remained research gaps in various studies. This study applies a comparative evaluation of authentication protocols, including their strengths and weaknesses. Thus, it forms the foundation in the IoT authentication field of study. In that direction, a multi authentication architecture that involves secured means is proposed for protocol authentication. Informal analysis can affect the security of the protocols. Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic provides proof of the attainment of mutual authentication. NS3 simulator tool is used to compare the performance of the proposed protocol to verify the formal security offered by the BAN logic.     

Portable and Efficient Implementation of CRYSTALS-Kyber Based on WebAssembly

With the rapid development of quantum computers capable of realizing Shor’s algorithm, existing public key-based algorithms face a significant security risk. Crystals-Kyber has been selected as the only key encapsulation mechanism (KEM) algorithm in the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) competition. In this study, we present a portable and efficient implementation of a Crystals-Kyber post-quantum KEM based on WebAssembly (Wasm), a recently released portable execution framework for high-performance web applications. Until now, most Kyber implementations have been developed with native programming languages such as C and Assembly. Although there are a few previous Kyber implementations based on JavaScript for portability, their performance is significantly lower than that of implementations based on native programming languages. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a portable and efficient Kyber implementation to secure web applications in the quantum computing era. Our Kyber software is based on JavaScript and Wasm to provide portability and efficiency while ensuring quantum security. Namely, the overall software is written in JavaScript, and the performance core parts (secure hash algorithm-3-based operations and polynomial multiplication) are written in Wasm. Furthermore, we parallelize the number theoretic transform (NTT)-based polynomial multiplication using single instruction multiple data (SIMD) functionality, which is available in Wasm. The three steps in the NTT-based polynomial multiplication have been parallelized with Wasm SIMD intrinsic functions. Our software outperforms the latest reference implementation of Kyber developed in JavaScript by ×4.02 (resp. ×4.32 and ×4.1), ×3.42 (resp. ×3.52 and ×3.44), and ×3.41 (resp. ×3.44 and ×3.38) in terms of key generation, encapsulation, and decapsulation on Google Chrome (resp. Firefox, and Microsoft Edge). As far as we know, this is the first software implementation of Kyber with Wasm technology in the web environment.     

Towards Sustainable Agricultural Systems: A Lightweight Deep Learning Model for Plant Disease Detection

A country’s economy heavily depends on agricultural development. However, due to several plant diseases, crop growth rate and quality are highly suffered. Accurate identification of these diseases via a manual procedure is very challenging and time-consuming because of the deficiency of domain experts and low-contrast information. Therefore, the agricultural management system is searching for an automatic early disease detection technique. To this end, an efficient and lightweight Deep Learning (DL)-based framework (E-GreenNet) is proposed to overcome these problems and precisely classify the various diseases. In the end-to-end architecture, a MobileNetV3Small model is utilized as a backbone that generates refined, discriminative, and prominent features. Moreover, the proposed model is trained over the PlantVillage (PV), Data Repository of Leaf Images (DRLI), and a new Plant Composite (PC) dataset individually, and later on test samples, its actual performance is evaluated. After extensive experimental analysis, the proposed model obtained 1.00%, 0.96% and 0.99% accuracies on all three included datasets. Moreover, the proposed method achieves better inference speed when compared with other State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) approaches. In addition, a comparative analysis is conducted where the proposed strategy shows tremendous discriminative scores as compared to the various pre-trained models and other Machine Learning (ML) and DL methods.     

Optimal Deep Learning Based Intruder Identification in Industrial Internet of Things Environment

With the increased advancements of smart industries, cybersecurity has become a vital growth factor in the success of industrial transformation. The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) or Industry 4.0 has revolutionized the concepts of manufacturing and production altogether. In industry 4.0, powerful Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) play a significant role in ensuring network security. Though various intrusion detection techniques have been developed so far, it is challenging to protect the intricate data of networks. This is because conventional Machine Learning (ML) approaches are inadequate and insufficient to address the demands of dynamic IIoT networks. Further, the existing Deep Learning (DL) can be employed to identify anonymous intrusions. Therefore, the current study proposes a Hunger Games Search Optimization with Deep Learning-Driven Intrusion Detection (HGSODL-ID) model for the IIoT environment. The presented HGSODL-ID model exploits the linear normalization approach to transform the input data into a useful format. The HGSO algorithm is employed for Feature Selection (HGSO-FS) to reduce the curse of dimensionality. Moreover, Sparrow Search Optimization (SSO) is utilized with a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) to classify and identify intrusions in the network. Finally, the SSO technique is exploited to fine-tune the hyper-parameters involved in the GCN model. The proposed HGSODL-ID model was experimentally validated using a benchmark dataset, and the results confirmed the superiority of the proposed HGSODL-ID method over recent approaches.     

Studying users’ perception of IoT mobile companion apps

Internet of Things (IoT) products provide over-the-net capabilities such as remote activation, monitoring, and notifications. An associated mobile app is often provided for more convenient usage of these capabilities. The perceived quality of these companion apps can impact the success of the IoT product. We investigate the perceived quality and prominent issues of smart-home IoT mobile companion apps with the aim of deriving insights to: (i) provide guidance to end users interested in adopting IoT products; (ii) inform companion app developers and IoT producers about characteristics frequently criticized by users; (iii) highlight open research directions. We employ a mixed-methods approach, analyzing both quantitative and qualitative data. We assess the perceived quality of companion apps by quantitatively analyzing the star rating and the sentiment of 1,347,799 Android and 48,498 iOS user reviews. We identify the prominent issues that afflict companion apps by performing a qualitative manual analysis of 1,000 sampled reviews. Our analysis shows that users’ judgment has not improved over the years. A variety of functional and non-functional issues persist, such as difficulties in pairing with the device, software flakiness, poor user interfaces, and presence of issues of a socio-technical impact. Our study highlights several aspects of companion apps that require improvement in order to meet user expectations and identifies future directions.     

Detecting Vulnerability on IoT Device Firmware: A Survey

Internet of things (IoT) devices make up 30% of all network-connected endpoints, introducing vulnerabilities and novel attacks that make many companies as primary targets for cybercriminals. To address this increasing threat surface, every organization deploying IoT devices needs to consider security risks to ensure those devices are secure and trusted. Among all the solutions for security risks, firmware security analysis is essential to fix software bugs, patch vulnerabilities, or add new security features to protect users of those vulnerable devices. However, firmware security analysis has never been an easy job due to the diversity of the execution environment and the close source of firmware. These two distinct features complicate the operations to unpack firmware samples for detailed analysis. They also make it difficult to create visual environments to emulate the running of device firmware. Although researchers have developed many novel methods to overcome various challenges in the past decade, critical barriers impede firmware security analysis in practice. Therefore, this survey is motivated to systematically review and analyze the research challenges and their solutions, considering both breadth and depth. Specifically, based on the analysis perspectives, various methods that perform security analysis on IoT devices are introduced and classified into four categories. The challenges in each category are discussed in detail, and potential solutions are proposed subsequently. We then discuss the flaws of these solutions and provide future directions for this research field. This survey can be utilized by a broad range of readers, including software developers, cyber security researchers, and software security engineers, to better understand firmware security analysis.      

基于深度稀疏自编码网络和场景分类器的 电网气象故障预警方法

为保证电网安全稳定运行,提高电网防灾减灾和弹性水平,提出了一种基于深度稀疏自编码网络和场景分类器的电网气象故障预警方法。首先,采用主客观权重相结合的动态赋权方法,对气象因子进行初始赋权,以合理表征不同气象因子对电网故障的影响程度。然后,对传统的深度自编码网络增加稀疏性约束条件,以提高网络训练的收敛性,并在深度自编码网络的最后一层增加场景分类器,以提高气象因子与电网故障场景间关联关系的合理性。最后,将带权重的气象因子以及设备因子和环境因子作为深度稀疏自编码网络的输入,利用支持向量机构建多因素耦合的电网气象灾害故障预警模型。采用实际电网故障算例验证了所提方法的有效性。     

The MIDAS touch: Thermal dissipation resulting from everyday interactions as a sensing modality

We contribute MIDAS as a novel sensing solution for characterizing everyday objects using thermal dissipation. MIDAS takes advantage of the fact that anytime a person touches an object it results in heat transfer. By capturing and modeling the dissipation of the transferred heat, e.g., through the decrease in the captured thermal radiation, MIDAS can characterize the object and determine its material. We validate MIDAS through extensive empirical benchmarks and demonstrate that MIDAS offers an innovative sensing modality that can recognize a wide range of materials – with up to 83% accuracy – and generalize to variations in the people interacting with objects. We also demonstrate that MIDAS can detect thermal dissipation through objects, up to 2 mm thickness, and support analysis of multiple objects that are interacted with.