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Smart Agriculture or Agricultural Internet of things, consists of integrating advanced technologies (e.g., NFV, SDN, 5G/6G, Blockchain, IoT, Fog, Edge, and AI) into existing farm operations to improve the quality and productivity of agricultural products. The convergence of Industry 4.0 and Intelligent Agriculture provides new opportunities for migration from factory agriculture to the future generation, known as Agriculture 4.0. However, since the deployment of thousands of IoT based devices is in an open field, there are many new threats in Agriculture 4.0. Security researchers are involved in this topic to ensure the safety of the system since an adversary can initiate many cyber attacks, such as DDoS attacks to making a service unavailable and then injecting false data to tell us that the agricultural equipment is safe but in reality, it has been theft. In this paper, we propose a deep learning-based intrusion detection system for DDoS attacks based on three models, namely, convolutional neural networks, deep neural networks, and recurrent neural networks. Each model’s performance is studied within two classification types (binary and multiclass) using two new real traffic datasets, namely, CIC-DDoS2019 dataset and TON_IoT dataset, which contain different types of DDoS attacks.

The proliferation of mobile health (mHealth) applications is partly driven by the advancements in sensing and communication technologies, as well as the integration of artificial intelligence techniques. Data collected from mHealth applications, for example, on sensor devices carried by patients, can be mined and analyzed using artificial intelligence-based solutions to facilitate remote and (near) real-time decision-making in health care settings. However, such data often sit in data silos, and patients are often concerned about the privacy implications of sharing their raw data. Federated learning (FL) is a potential solution, as it allows multiple data owners to collaboratively train a machine learning model without requiring access to each other's raw data. The goal of this scoping review is to gain an understanding of FL and its potential in dealing with sensitive and heterogeneous data in mHealth applications. Through this review, various stakeholders, such as health care providers, practitioners, and policy makers, can gain insight into the limitations and challenges associated with using FL in mHealth and make informed decisions when considering implementing FL-based solutions. We conducted a scoping review following the guidelines of PRISMA-ScR (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses Extension for Scoping Reviews). We searched 7 commonly used databases. The included studies were analyzed and summarized to identify the possible real-world applications and associated challenges of using FL in mHealth settings. A total of 1095 articles were retrieved during the database search, and 26 articles that met the inclusion criteria were included in the review. The analysis of these articles revealed 2 main application areas for FL in mHealth, that is, remote monitoring and diagnostic and treatment support. More specifically, FL was found to be commonly used for monitoring self-care ability, health status, and disease progression, as well as in diagnosis and treatment support of diseases. The review also identified several challenges (eg, expensive communication, statistical heterogeneity, and system heterogeneity) and potential solutions (eg, compression schemes, model personalization, and active sampling). This scoping review has highlighted the potential of FL as a privacy-preserving approach in mHealth applications and identified the technical limitations associated with its use. The challenges and opportunities outlined in this review can inform the research agenda for future studies in this field, to overcome these limitations and further advance the use of FL in mHealth.

In this paper, we propose an adversary model to facilitate forensic investigations of mobile devices (e.g. Android, iOS and Windows smartphones) that can be readily adapted to the latest mobile device technologies. This is essential given the ongoing and rapidly changing nature of mobile device technologies. An integral principle and significant constraint upon forensic practitioners is that of forensic soundness. Our adversary model specifically considers and integrates the constraints of forensic soundness on the adversary, in our case, a forensic practitioner. One construction of the adversary model is an evidence collection and analysis methodology for Android devices. Using the methodology with six popular cloud apps, we were successful in extracting various information of forensic interest in both the external and internal storage of the mobile device.

Rapid advances in wireless communications and pervasive computing technologies have resulted in increasing interest and popularity of Internet-of-Things (IoT) architecture, ubiquitously providing intelligence and convenience to our daily life. In IoT-based network environments, smart objects are embedded everywhere as ubiquitous things connected in a pervasive manner. Ensuring security for interactions between these smart things is significantly more important, and a topic of ongoing interest. In this paper, we present a certificateless signature scheme for smart objects in IoT-based pervasive computing environments. We evaluate the utility of the proposed scheme in IoT-oriented testbeds, i.e., Arduino Uno and Raspberry PI 2. Experiment results present the practicability of the proposed scheme. Moreover, we revisit the scheme of Wang et al. (2015) and revealed that a malicious super type I adversary can easily forge a legitimate signature to cheat any receiver as he/she wishes in the scheme. The superiority of the proposed certificateless signature scheme over relevant studies is demonstrated in terms of the summarized security and performance comparisons.

Instant messaging (IM) has changed the way people communicate with each other. However, the interactive and instant nature of these applications (apps) made them an attractive choice for malicious cyber activities such as phishing. The forensic examination of IM apps for modern Windows 8.1 (or later) has been largely unexplored, as the platform is relatively new. In this paper, we seek to determine the data remnants from the use of two popular Windows Store application software for instant messaging, namely Facebook and Skype on a Windows 8.1 client machine. This research contributes to an in-depth understanding of the types of terrestrial artefacts that are likely to remain after the use of instant messaging services and application software on a contemporary Windows operating system. Potential artefacts detected during the research include data relating to the installation or uninstallation of the instant messaging application software, log-in and log-off information, contact lists, conversations, and transferred files.

There has been an exponential growth use of enterprise social networks for improved communication, connection, collaboration and enhanced knowledge sharing within organizations. However, the intended benefits of this social network deployment have not been fully realized due to the relative low usage among employees. This study provides an insight into the underlying factors deemed likely to influence employees’ enterprise social networks consumptive and contributive use by modifying and extending the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT). An online survey was conducted and data were collected from 158 employees whose organizations are currently deploying a workplace social platform. The data were validated and analyzed using partial least square (PLS-SEM) method and Ordered Logistic Regression (OLR). Significant differences were found regarding the factors that influence consumptive and contributive use. The most influential factors for consumptive use are performance expectancy and content value, followed by facilitating conditions and effort expectancy. On the other hand, the contributive use is strongly influenced by social influence, content value and relationship expectancy. Moreover, a more balanced use pattern as measured by a smaller gap in consumptive and contributive use is shown to be positively associated with increased overall enterprise social network use. This study provides implications for managers to develop appropriate interventions to address idiosyncratic enterprise social network use patterns, minimize resistance and maximize effective utilization of the social platform among employees. This paper fulfills the need to identify important factors to be actively managed and manipulated to fully realize the benefits from the investment of enterprise social network.

Due to industrialization and informatization of the construction industry, prefabricated construction has attracted wide attention from both research and practitioner communities. In prefabricated construction, there are exacting requirements for information sharing. Also, data in a prefabricated component supply chain tend to be dispersed in design, production, transportation and other stages. In other words, such data are significantly multi-source heterogeneous. Without an effective way of participating in supply chain dynamic collaboration, decision-making at various stages and resource allocation can be extremely challenging. This paper proposes a decision support framework for prefabricated component supply chain based on ontology and multi-agent. The framework comprises the ontology layer (i.e. provides data support for the model), the agent interaction layer (i.e. serves as the communication hub to coordinate the data transmission between modules), and the agent simulation layer (i.e. simulates interaction behavior of participants, and supports decision making). Using the Shanghai Chenxiang Road Station complex project as a case study, the paper demonstrates the validity of the proposed ontology and multi-agent based decision support framework.

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging promising paradigm for network management because of its centralized network intelligence. However, the centralized control architecture of the software-defined networks (SDNs) brings novel challenges of reliability, scalability, fault tolerance and interoperability. In this paper, we proposed a novel clustered distributed controller architecture in the real setting of SDNs. The distributed cluster implementation comprises of multiple popular SDN controllers. The proposed mechanism is evaluated using a real world network topology running on top of an emulated SDN environment. The result shows that the proposed distributed controller clustering mechanism is able to significantly reduce the average latency from 8.1% to 1.6%, the packet loss from 5.22% to 4.15%, compared to distributed controller without clustering running on HP Virtual Application Network (VAN) SDN and Open Network Operating System (ONOS) controllers respectively. Moreover, proposed method also shows reasonable CPU utilization results. Furthermore, the proposed mechanism makes possible to handle unexpected load fluctuations while maintaining a continuous network operation, even when there is a controller failure. The paper is a potential contribution stepping towards addressing the issues of reliability, scalability, fault tolerance, and inter-operability.

A smart-card-based user authentication scheme for wireless sensor networks (hereafter referred to as a SCA-WSN scheme) is designed to ensure that only users who possess both a smart card and the corresponding password are allowed to gain access to sensor data and their transmissions. Despite many research efforts in recent years, it remains a challenging task to design an efficient SCA-WSN scheme that achieves user anonymity. The majority of published SCA-WSN schemes use only lightweight cryptographic techniques (rather than public-key cryptographic techniques) for the sake of efficiency, and have been demonstrated to suffer from the inability to provide user anonymity. Some schemes employ elliptic curve cryptography for better security but require sensors with strict resource constraints to perform computationally expensive scalar-point multiplications; despite the increased computational requirements, these schemes do not provide user anonymity. In this paper, we present a new SCA-WSN scheme that not only achieves user anonymity but also is efficient in terms of the computation loads for sensors. Our scheme employs elliptic curve cryptography but restricts its use only to anonymous user-to-gateway authentication, thereby allowing sensors to perform only lightweight cryptographic operations. Our scheme also enjoys provable security in a formal model extended from the widely accepted Bellare-Pointcheval-Rogaway (2000) model to capture the user anonymity property and various SCA-WSN specific attacks (e.g., stolen smart card attacks, node capture attacks, privileged insider attacks, and stolen verifier attacks).

The convergence of cloud computing and Internet of Things (IoT) is partially due to the pragmatic need for delivering extended services to a broader user base in diverse situations. However, cloud computing has its limitation for applications requiring low-latency and high mobility, particularly in adversarial settings (e.g. battlefields). To some extent, such limitations can be mitigated in a fog computing paradigm since the latter bridges the gap between remote cloud data center and the end devices (via some fog nodes). However, fog nodes are often deployed in remote and unprotected places. This necessitates the design of security solutions for a fog-based environment. In this paper, we investigate the fog-driven IoT healthcare system, focusing only on authentication and key agreement. Specifically, we propose a three-party authenticated key agreement protocol from bilinear pairings. We introduce the security model and present the formal security proof, as well as security analysis against common attacks. We then evaluate its performance, in terms of communication and computation costs.