Abstract

Over the past few years, online social networks (OSNs) have become an inseparable part of people's daily lives. Instead of being passive readers, people are now enjoying their role as content contributors. OSN has permitted its users to share their information including the multimedia content. OSN users can express themselves in virtual communities by providing their opinions and interacting with others. As a consequence, the privacy and security threats in OSNs have emerged as a major concern to the research and business world. In the recent past, a number of survey works have been conducted to discuss different security and privacy threats in OSNs. However, till date, no survey work has been conducted that aims to classify and analyze various machine learning (ML)-based solutions adapted for the security defense of OSNs. In this survey article, we present a detailed taxonomy with a classification of various works done on various security attacks in OSNs. We then review and summarize the existing state of art survey works on OSN security, and indicate the merits and limitations of these survey works. Next, we review all recent works that aim to provide ML-based solutions toward defense of security attacks on OSNs. Finally, we discuss the future road-map on OSN security and provide a comprehensive analysis on the open research issues with feasible measurements and possible solutions.

Abstract

The communication in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) suffers from various security and privacy related issues as several attacks, like replay, man-in-the-middle (MiTM), impersonation, data leakage and unauthorised data update attacks can be mounted by an adversary. Therefore, we need a robust security mechanism to sort out such issues, which can be further enhanced through the use of mechanism of blockchain technology. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based secure data exchange and storage framework for the ITS (in short, we call it as BDESF-ITS). We conduct the security analysis of the BDESF-ITS to prove its robustness against various possible attacks. The practical implementation of the BDESF-ITS is also carried out to observe its behaviour with the real world settings.

Abstract

With the widespread use of Internet of Things (IoT) in various applications and several security vulnerabilities reported in them, the security requirements have become an integral part of an IoT system. Authentication and access control are the two principal security requirements for ensuring authorized and restricted accesses to limited and essential resources in IoT. The built-in authentication mechanism in IoT devices is not reliable, because several security vulnerabilities are revealed in the firmware implementation of authentication protocols in IoT. On the other hand, the current authentication approaches for IoT that are not firmware are vulnerable to some security attacks prevalent in IoT. Moreover, the recent access control approaches for IoT have limitations in context-awareness, scalability, interoperability, and security. To mitigate these limitations, there is a need for a robust authentication and access control …

Abstract

Ransomware is a type of malicious program or soft- ware that encrypts the contents on a hard disc and prevents the users from accessing them unless they pay an amount (called a ransom). Most of the organizations, such as financial institutes and healthcare sectors (i.e., smart healthcare) are targeted by ransomware attacks. Ransomware assaults are among the most frightening types of cyber-attacks, and they are not confined to a specific sector or the countries. Blockchain is a tamper-proof tech- nology, which is more secure, robust and decentralized in nature. Features of blockchain can add more security for detection and mitigation of ransomware more effectively. In this paper, we pro- pose a new blockchain-enabled security framework to detect and defend the ransomware attacks for smart healthcare (in short, BSFR-SH). The conducted security analysis proves the security of the proposed BSFR-SH against the ransomware attacks. The performance of BSFR-SH is significantly better than the other similar existing mechanisms as it achieves better accuracy and F1-score than other compared mechanisms. Furthermore, the practical demonstration of BSFR-SH is provided to estimate the impact on important performance parameters. Index Terms—Ransomware, smart healthcare, intrusion detec- tion, machine learning, blockchain

Abstract

Smart Energy Systems (SES) are the need of the hour, given the looming dangers of power crises amid changing climatic conditions. However, sensitive data play a critical role in such systems deserving high privacy and security protection. This paper proposes a novel blockchain-based authentication scheme that preserves privacy using the zero-knowledge protocol. During informal analysis, the proposed scheme shows resistance to various attacks such as man-in-the-middle attacks, replay attacks, impersonation attacks, privileged insider attacks, and ephemeral secret leakage attacks. The formal security verification using AVISPA regards the scheme as safe. In addition, the scheme supports critical features such as anonymity and untraceability within limited computational and communicational costs. A simulation of blockchain using Node.js shows only a linear increase in computation time with an increase in the number of blocks, and transactions, and an exponential increase with the number of nodes.

Abstract

Agricultural industry is one of the most vital industries that has a major contribution to the economy due to its share in the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and as a source of employment. The past few decades have seen immense change in the operation of agricultural sector with the introduction of precision farming in conjunction with Internet of Things (IoT). The application of such advancements is highly based on exchange of messages between various devices in the farming. This paper aims to study the security scenarios applicable in husbandry through the analysis of possible attacks and threats. The testbeds available for agriculture based on IoT have been studied. An architecture for smart farming is proposed which is independent of the underlying technologies that may be used and the requirements of security have been laid out based on the proposed architecture. A literature survey of security protocols …

Abstract

In an Intelligent Precision Agriculture (IPA), several Internet of Things (IoT) smart devices and drones can be deployed to monitor an agricultural environment. The drones can be further utilized to collect the data from smart devices and send to the Ground Station Server (GSS). However, insecure communication among the smart devices, drones and the GSS make the IoT agriculture environment vulnerable to various potential attacks. For this goal, a new authentication and key management scheme for IoT-enabled IPA, called AKMS-AgriIoT, has been put forward with the private blockchain-based solution. The blocks formed with the encrypted transactions and their respective signatures by the GSS are mined by the cloud servers to verify and add the blocks in the private blockchain center. A detailed security analysis and comparative study reveal that the proposed AKMS-AgriIoT supports better security, and provides more functionality features, less communication costs and comparable computation costs as compared to other relevant schemes. In addition, the blockchain-based implementation on the proposed AKMS-AgriIoT has been also carried out.

Abstract

—Effective design of autopilots for fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is still a great challenge, due to unmodeled effects and uncertainties that these vehicles exhibit during flight. Unmodeled effects and uncertainties comprise longitudinal/lateral cross-couplings, as well as poor knowledge of equilibrium points (trimming points) of the UAV dynamics. The main contribution of this article is a new adaptive autopilot design, based on uncertain Euler–Lagrange dynamics of the UAV and where the control can explicitly take into account under-actuation in the dynamics, reduced structural knowledge of cross-couplings and trimming points. This system uncertainty is handled via appropriately designed adaptive laws: stability of the controlled UAV is analyzed. Hardware-in-the-loop tests, comparisons with an Ardupilot autopilot and with a robustified autopilot validate the effectiveness of the control design, even in the presence of strong saturation of the UAV actuators.

Abstract

—Connected vehicle means providing different services, such as advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) from vehicles connected to the network. Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) can support vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications to realize connected vehicle. In VANETs, secure communication must be ensured, as otherwise it can lead to traffic accidents and human injuries. Recently, many studies on V2I authentication have been conducted to guarantee the security of V2I communications. However, recent V2I authentication protocols do not consider the handover situation, and it causes unnecessary computations. As vehicles have limited computing resources, unnecessary computation can lead to overload to the vehicles. In recent years, blockchain-based VANET is an active field of research because it can provide decentralization, data integrity and transparency. Using the strength of the blockchain technology, we design a blockchain-based handover authentication protocol for VANETs. In the proposed protocol, vehicles only perform lightweight computations in handover situations for efficiency of the network. We also conduct the formal analysis such as Burrows–Abadi–Needham (BAN) logic, Real-Or-Random (ROR) oracle model, and Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) simulation to the proposed protocol. We simulate the proposed protocol using network simulator 3 (NS-3) to verify that the proposed protocol is practical. Finally, we compare the computational cost and security features of the proposed protocol with existing protocols to show that the proposed protocol is more secure and efficient.

Abstract

—Smart vehicles-enabled intelligent transportation system (ITS) supports a wide range of applications, such as, but not limited to, traffic planning and management, collision avoidance alert system, automated road speed enforcement, electronic toll collection, and real-time parking management, to name a few. However, it suffers from various types of security and privacy issues due to insecure communication among the entities over public channels. Therefore, an efficient and lightweight security mechanism is essential to protect the data that is both at rest as well as in transit. To this direction, we propose a public blockchain-envisioned secure communication framework for ITS (in short, called PBSCF-ITS). The proposed PBSCFITS guarantees access control and key management among the vehicle to vehicle, vehicle to road side unit, and road side unit to cloud server. We analyze the security of PBSCF-ITS to prove its resilience against various types of possible attacks. Furthermore, the performance of PBSCF-ITS with other related competing schemes has been compared. The obtained results illustrate that PBSCF-ITS outperforms the existing ones. Additionally, the pragmatic study of PBSCF-ITS is conducted to check its influence on various network related performance parameters, like number of mined blocks and transactions per block.