Article

FBI: A Federated Learning-Based Blockchain-Embedded Data Accumulation Scheme Using Drones for Internet of Things

February 2022
IEEE Wireless Communications Letters 11(5)

DOI:10.1109/LWC.2022.3151873

Authors:

Anik Islam Abhi

The University of Calgary

Ahmed Al Amin

University of Michigan

Soo Young Shin

Kumoh National Institute of Technology

This letter presents a federated learning-based data-accumulation scheme that combines drones and blockchain for remote regions where Internet of Things devices face network scarcity and potential cyber threats. The scheme contains a two-phase authentication mechanism in which requests are first validated using a cuckoo filter, followed by a timestamp nonce. Secure accumulation is achieved by validating models using a Hampel filter and loss checks. To increase the privacy of the model, differential privacy is employed before sharing. Finally, the model is stored in the blockchain after consent is obtained from mining nodes. Experiments are performed in a proper environment, and the results confirm the feasibility of the proposed scheme.

A comprehensive survey on data aggregation techniques in UAV-enabled Internet of things

Article

Full-text available

Nov 2023

In recent years, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been used to extend the Internet of things (IoT) framework owing to their vast applications, monitoring and surveillance capability, ubiquity, and mobility. To support IoT requirements, UAVs must be capable of aggregating, processing, and transmitting data in real-time basis. As not only the number of IoT devices but also the amount of data to be collected is increased, data aggregation is of great importance. Recently, the UAV can also function as a mobile edge computing server in association with aerial data aggregation. This paper is the first to survey the various aspects and techniques of UAV-based aerial data aggregation for IoT networks. After addressing key design issues, we review the existing data aggregation techniques along with possible future direction. They are then compared with each other in terms of major operational features, performance characteristics, advantages, and limitations. Open issues and research challenges are also discussed with possible solution approaches.

Emerging 6G/B6G Wireless Communication for the Power Infrastructure in Smart Cities: Innovations, Challenges, and Future Perspectives

Article

Full-text available

Oct 2023

A well-functioning smart grid is an essential part of an efficient and uninterrupted power supply for the key enablers of smart cities. To effectively manage the operations of a smart grid, there is an essential requirement for a seamless wireless communication system that provides high data rates, reliability, flexibility, massive connectivity, low latency, security, and adaptability to changing needs. A contemporary review of the utilization of emerging 6G wireless communication for the major applications of smart grids, especially in terms of massive connectivity and monitoring, secured communication for operation and resource management, and time-critical operations, are presented in this paper. This article starts with the key enablers of the smart city, along with the necessity of the smart grid for the key enablers of it. The fundamentals of the smart city, smart grid, and 6G wireless communication are also introduced in this paper. Moreover, the motivations to integrate 6G wireless communication with the smart grid system are expressed in this article as well. The relevant literature overview, along with the novelty of this paper, is depicted to bridge the gap of the current research works. We describe the novel technologies of 6G wireless communication to effectively perform the considered smart grid applications. Novel technologies of 6G wireless communication have significantly improved the key performance indicators compared to the prior generation of the wireless communication system. A significant part of this article is the contemporary survey of the considered major applications of a smart grid that is served by 6G. In addition, the anticipated challenges and interesting future research pathways are also discussed explicitly in this article. This article serves as a valuable resource for understanding the potential of 6G wireless communication in advancing smart grid applications and addressing emerging challenges.

A Blockchain-Facilitated Secure Sensing Data Processing and Logging System

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2023

In this paper, we present the design, implementation, and evaluation of a secure sensing data processing and logging system. The system is inspired and enabled by blockchain. In this system, a public blockchain is used as immutable data store to store the most critical data needed to secure the system. Furthermore, several innovative blockchain-inspired mechanisms have been incorporated into the system to provide additional security for the system’s operations. The first priority in securing sensing data processing and logging is admission control, i.e ., only legitimate sensing data are accepted for processing and logging. This is achieved via a sensor identification and authentication mechanism. The second priority is to ensure that the logged data remain intact overtime. This is achieved by storing a small amount of data condensed from the raw sensing data on a public blockchain. A Merkel-tree based mechanism is devised to link the raw sensing data stored off-chain to the condensed data placed on public blockchain. This mechanism passes the data immutability property of a public blockchain to the raw sensing data stored off-chain. Third, the raw sensing data stored off-chain are secured with a self-protection mechanism where the raw sensing data are grouped into chained blocks with a moderate amount of proof-of-work. This scheme prevents an adversary from making arbitrary changes to the logged data within a short period of time. Fourth, mechanisms are developed to facilitate the search of the condensed data placed on the public blockchain and the verification of the raw sensing data using the condensed data placed on the public blockchain. The system is implemented in Python except the graphical user interface, which is developed using C#. The functionality and feasibility of the system have been evaluated locally and with two public blockchain systems, one is the IOTA Shimmer test network, and the other is Ethereum.

Energy-efficient RL-based aerial network deployment testbed for disaster areas

Article

Full-text available

Feb 2023

Rapid deployment of wireless devices with 5G and beyond enabled a connected world. However, an immediate demand increase right after a disaster paralyzes network infrastructure temporarily. The continuous flow of information is crucial during disaster times to coordinate rescue operations and identify the survivors. Communication infrastructures built for users of disaster areas should satisfy rapid deployment, increased coverage, and availability. Unmanned air vehicles (UAV) provide a potential solution for rapid deployment as they are not affected by traffic jams and physical road damage during a disaster. In addition, ad-hoc WiFi communication allows the generation of broadcast domains within a clear channel which eases one-to-many communications. Moreover, using reinforcement learning (RL) helps reduce the computational cost and increases the accuracy of the NP-hard problem of aerial network deployment. To this end, a novel flying WiFi ad-hoc network management model is proposed in this paper. The model utilizes deep-Q-learning to maintain quality-of-service (QoS), increase user equipment (UE) coverage, and optimize power efficiency. Furthermore, a testbed is deployed on Istanbul Technical University (ITU) campus to train the developed model. Training results of the model using testbed accumulates over 90% packet delivery ratio as QoS, over 97% coverage for the users in flow tables, and 0.28 KJ/Bit average power consumption.

Lightweight blockchain solutions: Taxonomy, research progress, and comprehensive review

Article

Nov 2023

Abstract The proliferation of resource-constrained devices has become prevalent across various digital applications, including smart homes, smart healthcare, and smart transportation, among others. However, the integration of these devices brings many security issues. To address these concerns, Blockchain technology has been widely adopted due to its robust security characteristics, including immutability, cryptography, and distributed consensus. However, implementing blockchain within these networks is highly challenging due to the limited resources of the employed devices and the resource-intensive requirements of the blockchain. To overcome these challenges, a multitude of researchers have proposed lightweight blockchain solutions specifically designed for resource-constrained networks. In this paper, we present a taxonomy of lightweight blockchain solutions proposed in the literature. More precisely, we identify five areas within the “lightweight” concept, namely, blockchain architecture, device authentication, cryptography model, consensus algorithm, and storage method. We discuss the various methods employed in each “lightweight” category, highlighting existing gaps and identifying areas for improvement. Our review highlights the missing points in existing systems and paves the way to building a complete lightweight blockchain solution for networks of resource-constrained devices.

NFT-Based Blockchain-Oriented Security Framework for Metaverse Applications

Preprint

Full-text available

Jul 2023

The Metaverse is rapidly evolving, bringing us closer to its imminent reality. However, the widespread adoption of this new automated technology poses significant research challenges in terms of authenticity, integrity, interoperability, and efficiency. These challenges originate from the core technologies underlying the Metaverse and are exacerbated by its complex nature. As a solution to these challenges, this paper presents a novel framework based on Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). The framework employs the Proof-of-Stake consensus algorithm, a blockchain-based technology, for data transaction, validation, and resource management. PoS efficiently consume energy and provide a streamlined validation approach instead of resource-intensive mining. This ability makes PoS an ideal candidate for Metaverse applications. By combining NFTs for user authentication and PoS for data integrity, enhanced transaction throughput, and improved scalability, the proposed blockchain mechanism demonstrates noteworthy advantages. Through security analysis, experimental and simulation results, it is established that the NFT-based approach coupled with the PoS algorithm is secure and efficient for Metaverse applications.

Blockchain-Based Trusted Federated Learning with Pre-Trained Models for COVID-19 Detection

Article

Full-text available

Apr 2023

COVID-19 is a serious epidemic that not only endangers human health, but also wreaks havoc on the development of society. Recently, there has been research on using artificial intelligence (AI) techniques for COVID-19 detection. As AI has entered the era of big models, deep learning methods based on pre-trained models (PTMs) have become a focus of industrial applications. Federated learning (FL) enables the union of geographically isolated data, which can address the demands of big data for PTMs. However, the incompleteness of the healthcare system and the untrusted distribution of medical data make FL participants unreliable, and medical data also has strong privacy protection requirements. Our research aims to improve training efficiency and global model accuracy using PTMs for training in FL, reducing computation and communication. Meanwhile, we provide a secure aggregation rule using differential privacy and fully homomorphic encryption to achieve a privacy-preserving Byzantine robust federal learning scheme. In addition, we use blockchain to record the training process and we integrate a Byzantine fault tolerance consensus to further improve robustness. Finally, we conduct experiments on a publicly available dataset, and the experimental results show that our scheme is effective with privacy-preserving and robustness. The final trained models achieve better performance on the positive prediction and severe prediction tasks, with an accuracy of 85.00% and 85.06%, respectively. Thus, this indicates that our study is able to provide reliable results for COVID-19 detection.

Edge Machine Learning for the Automated Decision and Visual Computing of the Robots, IoT Embedded Devices or UAV-Drones

Article

Full-text available

Oct 2022

This paper presents edge machine learning (ML) technology and the challenges of its implementation into various proof-of-concept solutions developed by the authors. Paper presents the concept of Edge ML from a variety of perspectives, describing different implementations such as: a tech-glove smart device (IoT embedded device) for controlling teleoperated robots or an UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles/drones) that is processing data locally (at the device level) using machine learning techniques and artificial intelligence neural networks (deep learning algorithms), to make decisions without interrogating the cloud platforms. Implementation challenges used in Edge ML are described and analyzed in comparisons with other solutions. An IoT embedded device integrated into a tech glove, which controls a teleoperated robot, is used to run the AI neural network inference. The neural network was trained in an ML cloud for better control. Implementation developments, behind the UAV device capable of visual computation using machine learning, are presented.

sustainability-15-13951

Article

Full-text available

Sep 2023

Systems for monitoring air quality are essential for reducing the negative consequences of air pollution, but creating real-time systems encounters several challenges. The accuracy and effectiveness of these systems can be greatly improved by integrating federated learning and multi-access edge computing (MEC) technology. This paper critically reviews the state-of-the-art methodologies for federated learning and MEC-enabled air quality monitoring systems. It discusses the immense benefits of federated learning, including privacy-preserving model training, and MEC, such as reduced latency and improved response times, for air quality monitoring applications. Additionally, it highlights the challenges and requirements for developing and implementing real-time air quality monitoring systems, such as data quality, security, and privacy, as well as the need for interpretable and explainable AI-powered models. By leveraging such advanced techniques and technologies, air monitoring systems can overcome various challenges and deliver accurate, reliable, and timely air quality predictions. Moreover, this article provides an in-depth analysis and assessment of the state-of-the-art techniques and emphasizes the need for further research to develop more practical and affordable AI-powered decentralized systems with improved performance and data quality and security while ensuring the ethical and responsible use of the data to support informed decision making and promote sustainability.

A Federated Transfer Learning-Empowered Blockchain-Enabled Secure Knowledge Sharing Scheme for Unmanned Any Vehicles in Smart Cities

Conference Paper

Dec 2023

Smart cities embrace unmanned autonomous vehicles (UxVs) for urban mobility and addressing challenges. UxVs include UAVs, UGVs, USVs, and UUVs, empowered by AI, particularly deep learning (DL), for autonomous missions. However, traditional DL has limitations in adapting to dynamic environments and raises data privacy concerns. Limited data availability and starting from scratch to adapt to a new environment during missions pose challenges. Additionally, cyber threats, particularly in terms of communication and data security, can jeopardize the missions performed by UxVs. This paper proposes a federated transfer learning scheme for UxVs, sharing prior knowledge and training with limited data while ensuring security through blockchain. Domain adaptation with maximum mean discrepancy enhances the DL model's performance in target domains. The proposed scheme's feasibility is demonstrated in an empirical environment, and it outperforms existing works.

Intelligent data offloading learning model for autonomous vehicular networks

Article

Full-text available

Sep 2023

When individuals are accustomed to receiving information in automobiles, mobile data offloading is becoming more common. However, the effects of movement of the vehicle in correspondence to relative speed and direction between vehicles, have a significant impact on mobile data offloading. An innovative deep learning algorithm namely, intelligent deep neural network (IDNN) is proposed for vehicle data offloading and an optimal algorithm namely, quasi opposition based C‐hen swarm optimization (QOCSO) is proposed for efficient vehicle resource allocation. Initially, the vehicles in the vehicular networks are clustered with the help of the cosine similarity‐based K‐means algorithm for transmitting the data in an energy‐aware manner. Then cluster heads (CHs) are optimally selected for the generated clusters using Boltzmann selection probability‐based earth worm algorithm. The selected CHs are responsible for collecting the data from the cluster members and that is forwarded to the roadside unit. Then the suitable mobile edge servers are selected according to the IDNN algorithm that offloads the data from the CHs to the appropriate server. These received tasks of the vehicles could be stored as a blockchain for providing security to the vehicular network and finally, the resource allocation of the incoming tasks to the vehicles is performed using the QOCSO algorithm. Experiment findings reveal that both offloading and resource scheduling techniques outperform existing state‐of‐the‐art vehicular network algorithms.

Federated Edge Intelligence and Edge Caching Mechanisms

Article

Full-text available

Jul 2023

Federated learning (FL) has emerged as a promising technique for preserving user privacy and ensuring data security in distributed machine learning contexts, particularly in edge intelligence and edge caching applications. Recognizing the prevalent challenges of imbalanced and noisy data impacting scalability and resilience, our study introduces two innovative algorithms crafted for FL within a peer-to-peer framework. These algorithms aim to enhance performance, especially in decentralized and resource-limited settings. Furthermore, we propose a client-balancing Dirichlet sampling algorithm with probabilistic guarantees to mitigate oversampling issues, optimizing data distribution among clients to achieve more accurate and reliable model training. Within the specifics of our study, we employed 10, 20, and 40 Raspberry Pi devices as clients in a practical FL scenario, simulating real-world conditions. The well-known FedAvg algorithm was implemented, enabling multi-epoch client training before weight integration. Additionally, we examined the influence of real-world dataset noise, culminating in a performance analysis that underscores how our novel methods and research significantly advance robust and efficient FL techniques, thereby enhancing the overall effectiveness of decentralized machine learning applications, including edge intelligence and edge caching.

A Privacy Robust Aggregation Method Based on Federated Learning in the IoT

Article

Full-text available

Jul 2023

Federated learning has been widely applied because it enables a large number of IoT devices to conduct collaborative training while maintaining private data localization. However, the security risks and threats faced by federated learning in IoT applications are becoming increasingly prominent. Except for direct data leakage, there is also a need to face threats that attackers interpret gradients and infer private information. This paper proposes a Privacy Robust Aggregation Based on Federated Learning (PBA), which can be applied to multiple server scenarios. PBA filters outliers by using the approximate Euclidean distance calculated from binary sequences and the 3σ criterion. Then, this paper provides correctness analysis and computational complexity analysis on the aggregation process of PBA. Moreover, the performance of PBA is evaluated concerning ensuring privacy and robustness in this paper. The results indicate that PBA can resist Byzantine attacks and a state-of-the-art privacy inference, which means that PBA can ensure privacy and robustness.

A FL-Based Radio Map Reconstruction Approach for UAV-Aided Wireless Networks

Article

Full-text available

Jun 2023

Radio maps, which can provide metrics for signal strength at any location in a geographic space, are useful for many applications of 6G technologies, including UAV-assisted communication, network planning, and resource allocation. However, current crowd-sourced reconstruction methods necessitate large amounts of privacy-sensitive user data and entail the training of all data with large models, especially in deep learning. This poses a threat to user privacy, reducing the willingness to provide data, and consuming significant server resources, rendering the reconstruction of radio maps on resource-constrained UAVs challenging. To address these limitations, a self-supervised federated learning model called RadioSRCNet is proposed. The model utilizes a super-resolution (SR)-based network and feedback training strategy to predict the pathloss for continuous positioning. In our proposition, users retain the original data locally for training, acting as clients, while the UAV functions as a server to aggregate non-sensitive data for radio map reconstruction in a federated learning (FL) manner. We have employed a feedback training strategy to accelerate convergence and alleviate training difficulty. In addition, we have introduced an arbitrary position prediction (APP) module to decrease resource consumption in clients. This innovative module struck a balance between spatial resolution and computational complexity. Our experimental results highlight the superiority of our proposed framework, as our model achieves higher accuracy while incurring less communication overheads in a computationally and storage-efficient manner as compared to other deep learning methods.

Privacy-Enhancing Technologies in Federated Learning for the Internet of Healthcare Things: A Survey

Article

Full-text available

Jun 2023

Advancements in wearable medical devices using the IoT technology are shaping the modern healthcare system. With the emergence of the Internet of Healthcare Things (IoHT), efficient healthcare services can be provided to patients. Healthcare professionals have effectively used AI-based models to analyze the data collected from IoHT devices to treat various diseases. Data must be processed and analyzed while avoiding privacy breaches, in compliance with legal rules and regulations, such as the HIPAA and GDPR. Federated learning (FL) is a machine learning-based approach allowing multiple entities to train an ML model collaboratively without sharing their data. It is particularly beneficial in healthcare, where data privacy and security are substantial concerns. Even though FL addresses some privacy concerns, there is still no formal proof of privacy guarantees for IoHT data. Privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) are tools and techniques designed to enhance the privacy and security of online communications and data sharing. PETs provide a range of features that help protect users’ personal information and sensitive data from unauthorized access and tracking. This paper comprehensively reviews PETs concerning FL in the IoHT scenario and identifies several key challenges for future research.

A Blockchain-Based Federated-Learning Framework for Defense against Backdoor Attacks

Article

Full-text available

Jun 2023

Federated learning (FL) is a technique that involves multiple participants who update their local models with private data and aggregate these models using a central server. Unfortunately, central servers are prone to single-point failures during the aggregation process, which leads to data leakage and other problems. Although many studies have shown that a blockchain can solve the single-point failure of servers, blockchains cannot identify or mitigate the effect of backdoor attacks. Therefore, this paper proposes a blockchain-based FL framework for defense against backdoor attacks. The framework utilizes blockchains to record transactions in an immutable distributed ledger network and enables decentralized FL. Furthermore, by incorporating the reverse layer-wise relevance (RLR) aggregation strategy into the participant’s aggregation algorithm and adding gradient noise to limit the effectiveness of backdoor attacks, the accuracy of backdoor attacks is substantially reduced. Furthermore, we designed a new proof-of-stake mechanism that considers the historical stakes of participants and the accuracy for selecting the miners of the local model, thereby reducing the stake rewards of malicious participants and motivating them to upload honest model parameters. Our simulation results confirm that, for 10% of malicious participants, the success rate of backdoor injection is reduced by nearly 90% compared to Vanilla FL, and the stake income of malicious devices is the lowest.

Federated Blockchain Learning at the Edge

Article

Full-text available

May 2023

Machine learning, particularly using neural networks, is now widely adopted in practice even with the IoT paradigm; however, training neural networks at the edge, on IoT devices, remains elusive, mainly due to computational requirements. Furthermore, effective training requires large quantities of data and privacy concerns restrict accessible data. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a method leveraging a blockchain and federated learning to train neural networks at the edge effectively bypassing these issues and providing additional benefits such as distributing training across multiple devices. Federated learning trains networks without storing any data and aggregates multiple networks, trained on unique data, forming a global network via a centralized server. By leveraging the decentralized nature of a blockchain, this centralized server is replaced by a P2P network, removing the need for a trusted centralized server and enabling the learning process to be distributed across participating devices. Our results show that networks trained in such a manner have negligible differences in accuracy compared to traditionally trained networks on IoT devices and are less prone to overfitting. We conclude that not only is this a viable alternative to traditional paradigms but is an improvement that contains a wealth of benefits in an ecosystem such as a hospital.

Blockchained Federated Learning for Internet of Things: A Comprehensive Survey

Preprint

Full-text available

May 2023

The demand for intelligent industries and smart services based on big data is rising rapidly with the increasing digitization and intelligence of the modern world. This survey comprehensively reviews Blockchained Federated Learning (BlockFL) that joins the benefits of both Blockchain and Federated Learning to provide a secure and efficient solution for the demand. We compare the existing BlockFL models in four Internet-of-Things (IoT) application scenarios: Personal IoT (PIoT), Industrial IoT (IIoT), Internet of Vehicles (IoV), and Internet of Health Things (IoHT), with a focus on security and privacy, trust and reliability, efficiency, and data heterogeneity. Our analysis shows that the features of decentralization and transparency make BlockFL a secure and effective solution for distributed model training, while the overhead and compatibility still need further study. It also reveals the unique challenges of each domain presents unique challenges, e.g., the requirement of accommodating dynamic environments in IoV and the high demands of identity and permission management in IoHT, in addition to some common challenges identified, such as privacy, resource constraints, and data heterogeneity. Furthermore, we examine the existing technologies that can benefit BlockFL, thereby helping researchers and practitioners to make informed decisions about the selection and development of BlockFL for various IoT application scenarios.

Cloud-Based Smart Contract Analysis in FinTech Using IoT-Integrated Federated Learning in Intrusion Detection

Article

Full-text available

Apr 2023

Data sharing is proposed because the issue of data islands hinders advancement of artificial intelligence technology in the 5G era. Sharing high-quality data has a direct impact on how well machine-learning models work, but there will always be misuse and leakage of data. The field of financial technology, or FinTech, has received a lot of attention and is growing quickly. This field has seen the introduction of new terms as a result of its ongoing expansion. One example of such terminology is “FinTech”. This term is used to describe a variety of procedures utilized frequently in the financial technology industry. This study aims to create a cloud-based intrusion detection system based on IoT federated learning architecture as well as smart contract analysis. This study proposes a novel method for detecting intrusions using a cyber-threat federated graphical authentication system and cloud-based smart contracts in FinTech data. Users are required to create a route on a world map as their credentials under this scheme. We had 120 people participate in the evaluation, 60 of whom had a background in finance or FinTech. The simulation was then carried out in Python using a variety of FinTech cyber-attack datasets for accuracy, precision, recall, F-measure, AUC (Area under the ROC Curve), trust value, scalability, and integrity. The proposed technique attained accuracy of 95%, precision of 85%, RMSE of 59%, recall of 68%, F-measure of 83%, AUC of 79%, trust value of 65%, scalability of 91%, and integrity of 83%.

An Efficient Edge Computing Management Mechanism for Sustainable Smart Cities

Article

Apr 2023

Blockchain Meets Federated Learning in Healthcare: A Systematic Review With Challenges and Opportunities

Article

Mar 2023

Recently, innovations in the Internet-of-Medical-Things (IoMT), information and communication technologies, and Machine Learning (ML) have enabled smart healthcare. Pooling medical data into a centralised storage system to train a robust ML model, on the other hand, poses privacy, ownership, and regulatory challenges. Federated Learning (FL) overcomes the prior problems with a centralised aggregator server and a shared global model. However, there are two technical challenges: FL members need to be motivated to contribute their time and effort, and the centralised FL server may not accurately aggregate the global model. Therefore, combining the blockchain and FL can overcome these issues and provide high-level security and privacy for smart healthcare in a decentralised fashion. This study integrates two emerging technologies, blockchain and FL, for healthcare. We describe how blockchain-based FL plays a fundamental role in improving competent healthcare, where edge nodes manage the blockchain to avoid a single point of failure, while IoMT devices employ FL to use dispersed clinical data fully. We discuss the benefits and limitations of combining both technologies based on a content analysis approach. We emphasise three main research streams based on a systematic analysis of blockchain-empowered (i) IoMT, (ii) Electronic Health Records (EHR) and Electronic Medical Records (EMR) management, and (iii) digital healthcare systems (internal consortium/secure alerting). In addition, we present a novel conceptual framework of blockchain-enabled FL for the digital healthcare environment. Finally, we highlight the challenges and future directions of combining blockchain and FL for healthcare applications.

TB-ICT: A Trustworthy Blockchain-Enabled System for Indoor Contact Tracing in Epidemic Control

Article

Apr 2023

Recently, as a consequence of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, dependence on contact tracing (CT) models has significantly increased to prevent the spread of this highly contagious virus and be prepared for the potential future ones. Since the spreading probability of the novel coronavirus in indoor environments is much higher than that of the outdoors , there is an urgent and unmet quest to develop/design efficient, autonomous, trustworthy, and secure indoor CT solutions. Despite such an urgency, this field is still in its infancy. This article addresses this gap and proposes the trustworthy blockchain-enabled system for an indoor CT (TB-ICT) framework. The TB-ICT framework is proposed to protect privacy and integrity of the underlying CT data from unauthorized access. More specifically, it is a fully distributed and innovative blockchain platform exploiting the proposed dynamic Proof-of-Work (dPoW) credit-based consensus algorithm coupled with randomized hash window (W-Hash) and dynamic Proof-of-Credit (dPoC) mechanisms to differentiate between honest and dishonest nodes. The TB-ICT not only provides a decentralization in data replication but also quantifies the node's behavior based on its underlying credit-based mechanism. For achieving a high local-ization performance, we capitalize on the availability of Internet of Things (IoT) indoor localization infrastructures, and develop a data-driven localization model based on bluetooth low-energy (BLE) sensor measurements. The simulation results show that the proposed TB-ICT prevents the COVID-19 from spreading by the implementation of a highly accurate CT model while improving the users' privacy and security. Index Terms-Blockchain, bluetooth low energy (BLE), contact tracing (CT), indoor localization.

Federated learning‐based colorectal cancer classification by convolutional neural networks and general visual representation learning

Article

Full-text available

Mar 2023
INT J IMAG SYST TECH

Mehmet Nergiz

Colorectal cancer is the fourth fatal disease in the world, and the massive burden on the pathologists related to the classification of precancerous and cancerous colorectal lesions can be decreased by deep learning (DL) methods. However, the data privacy of the patients is a big challenge for being able to train deep learning models using big medical data. Federated Learning is a rising star in this era by providing the ability to train deep learning models on different sites without sacrificing data privacy. In this study, the Big Transfer model, which is a new General Visual Representation Learning method and six other classical DL methods are converted to the federated version. The effect of the federated learning is measured on all these models on four different data settings extracted from the MHIST and Chaoyang datasets. The proposed models are tested for single learning, centralized learning, and federated learning. The best AUC values of federated learning on Chaoyang are obtained by the Big Transfer and VGG models at 90.77% and 90.76%, respectively, whereas the best AUC value on MHIST is obtained by the Big Transfer model at 89.72%. The overall obtained results of models on all data settings show that the contribution of Federated Learning with respect to single learning is 4.71% and 11.68% for the “uniform” and “label-biased” data settings of Chaoyang, respectively, and 6.89% for the “difficulty level-biased” data setting of MHIST. Thus, it is experimentally shown that federated learning can be applied to the field of computational pathology for new institutional collaborations.

Federated learning for 6G-enabled secure communication systems: a comprehensive survey

Article

Full-text available

Mar 2023
ARTIF INTELL REV

Machine learning (ML) and Deep learning (DL) models are popular in many areas, from business, medicine, industries, healthcare, transportation, smart cities, and many more. However, the conventional centralized training techniques may not apply to upcoming distributed applications, which require high accuracy and quick response time. It is mainly due to limited storage and performance bottleneck problems on the centralized servers during the execution of various ML and DL-based models. However, federated learning (FL) is a developing approach to training ML models in a collaborative and distributed manner. It allows the full potential exploitation of these models with unlimited data and distributed computing power. In FL, edge computing devices collaborate to train a global model on their private data and computational power without sharing their private data on the network, thereby offering privacy preservation by default. But the distributed nature of FL faces various challenges related to data heterogeneity, client mobility, scalability, and seamless data aggregation. Moreover, the communication channels, clients, and central servers are also vulnerable to attacks which may give various security threats. Thus, a structured vulnerability and risk assessment are needed to deploy FL successfully in real-life scenarios. Furthermore, the scope of FL is expanding in terms of its application areas, with each area facing different threats. In this paper, we analyze various vulnerabilities present in the FL environment and design a literature survey of possible threats from the perspective of different application areas. Also, we review the most recent defensive algorithms and strategies used to guard against security and privacy threats in those areas. For a systematic coverage of the topic, we considered various applications under four main categories: space, air, ground, and underwater communications. We also compared the proposed methodologies regarding the underlying approach, base model, datasets, evaluation matrices, and achievements. Lastly, various approaches’ future directions and existing drawbacks are discussed in detail.

A Systematic Literature Review of Lightweight Blockchain for IoT

Article

Full-text available

Nov 2022

The Internet of Things (IoT) has become an essential part of our society. IoT devices are used in our houses, hospitals, cars, industry, etc., making our lives easier. Nonetheless, there are a number of serious concerns about security, privacy and performance issues in IoT. It has been proven that the aforementioned issues are strictly related to the high degree of centralisation of current IoT architecture. Thus, there is an increasing interest in adopting blockchain in IoT. However, blockchain adoption is not straightforward due to the power, storage and computational limitations of IoT. Consequently, the concept of lightweight blockchain is getting more and more attention from researchers and engineers. In this paper, we conduct a systematic literature review on the lightweight blockchain concept for IoT following the PRISMA methodology. We systematically analyse "lightweight blockchain for IoT" proposals in order to better understand the limitations of blockchain for IoT, the characteristics of the current work on this topic and further research opportunities. Specifically, we analyse the definition of lightweight blockchain that other authors give, the characteristics of the reviewed proposals, their "lightweight" aspects and their evaluation. Finally, we discuss the results of the review along with further research opportunities. Consequently, this work is mostly focused on understanding the technical and performance-related aspects of blockchain for IoT as a prelude to more specific analysis such as security (i.e., attacks, vulnerabilities, etc.).

SHFL: K-Anonymity-Based Secure Hierarchical Federated Learning Framework for Smart Healthcare Systems

Article

Full-text available

Nov 2022

Dynamic and smart Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructures allow the development of smart healthcare systems, which are equipped with mobile health and embedded healthcare sensors to enable a broad range of healthcare applications. These IoT applications provide access to the clients’ health information. However, the rapid increase in the number of mobile devices and social networks has generated concerns regarding the secure sharing of a client’s location. In this regard, federated learning (FL) is an emerging paradigm of decentralized machine learning that guarantees the training of a shared global model without compromising the data privacy of the client. To this end, we propose a K-anonymity-based secure hierarchical federated learning (SHFL) framework for smart healthcare systems. In the proposed hierarchical FL approach, a centralized server communicates hierarchically with multiple directly and indirectly connected devices. In particular, the proposed SHFL formulates the hierarchical clusters of location-based services to achieve distributed FL. In addition, the proposed SHFL utilizes the K-anonymity method to hide the location of the cluster devices. Finally, we evaluated the performance of the proposed SHFL by configuring different hierarchical networks with multiple model architectures and datasets. The experiments validated that the proposed SHFL provides adequate generalization to enable network scalability of accurate healthcare systems without compromising the data and location privacy.

Artificial-intelligence robot umpires in sailing race

Article

Full-text available

Nov 2022

Chien-Hung Wu

Today, many maritime nations have been promoting boat sports proactively, including sailing races. As sailing races are large-scale regattas that require massive workforces to monitor the game fairly; however, with limited match budgets and labors, Internet of Things (IoT) technology supports monitoring games has become a trend. This article proposes a robot umpire system in sailing races based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques, using drones and AIoT technology to monitor sailing matches. When a large number of sailboats are in a match, and each sail along different routes, drones can monitor the entire game simultaneously. The features of this proposed approach are (1) The system recognizes images by Faster R-CNN, judging whether a sailboat uses a motor to accelerate; (2) The system detects conditions by edge computing; when cheating behaviors happen, it can notify the event holder immediately; (3) Advanced drone route plans can avoid collision incidents; (4) Improve the system recognition by federated learning. This study has implemented an experiment with real drones and installed IoT equipment on the drones for taking videos and recognizing. The experimental result has shown that the proposed approach is feasible and benefits the match's fairness. Additionally, umpires can review the violation details from the videos taken by the drones, supporting evidence for judging.

Efficient and Secure WiFi Signal Booster via Unmanned Aerial Vehicles WiFi Repeater Based on Intelligence Based Localization Swarm and Blockchain

Article

Full-text available

Nov 2022

Recently, the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) under the umbrella of the Internet of Things (IoT) in smart cities and emerging communities have become the focus of the academic and industrial science community. On this basis, UAVs have been used in many military and commercial systems as emergency transport and air support during natural disasters and epidemics. In such previous scenarios, boosting wireless signals in remote or isolated areas would need a mobile signal booster placed on UAVs, and, at the same time, the data would be secured by a secure decentralized database. This paper contributes to investigating the possibility of using a wireless repeater placed on a UAV as a mobile booster for weak wireless signals in isolated or rural areas in emergency situations and that the transmitted information is protected from external interference and manipulation. The working mechanism is as follows: one of the UAVs detect a human presence in a predetermined area with the thermal camera and then directs the UAVs to the location to enhance the weak signal and protect the transmitted data. The methodology of localization and clusterization of the UAVs is represented by a swarm intelligence localization (SIL) optimization algorithm. At the same time, the information sent by UAV is protected by blockchain technology as a decentralization database. According to realistic studies and analyses of UAVs localization and clusterization, the proposed idea can improve the amplitude of the wireless signals in far regions. In comparison, this database technique is difficult to attack. The research ultimately supports emergency transport networks, blockchain, and IoT services.

Applications and Challenges of Federated Learning Paradigm in the Big Data Era with Special Emphasis on COVID-19

Article

Full-text available

Oct 2022

Federated learning (FL) is one of the leading paradigms of modern times with higher privacy guarantees than any other digital solution. Since its inception in 2016, FL has been rigorously investigated from multiple perspectives. Some of these perspectives are extensions of FL’s applications in different sectors, communication overheads, statistical heterogeneity problems, client dropout issues, the legitimacy of FL system results, privacy preservation, etc. Recently, FL is being increasingly used in the medical domain for multiple purposes, and many successful applications exist that are serving mankind in various ways. In this work, we describe the novel applications and challenges of the FL paradigm with special emphasis on the COVID-19 pandemic. We describe the synergies of FL with other emerging technologies to accomplish multiple services to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. We analyze the recent open-source development of FL which can help in designing scalable and reliable FL models. Lastly, we suggest valuable recommendations to enhance the technical persuasiveness of the FL paradigm. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first work that highlights the efficacy of FL in the era of COVID-19. The analysis enclosed in this article can pave the way for understanding the technical efficacy of FL in medical field, specifically COVID-19.

Framing Network Flow for Anomaly Detection Using Image Recognition and Federated Learning

Article

Full-text available

Sep 2022

The intrusion detection system (IDS) must be able to handle the increase in attack volume, increasing Internet traffic, and accelerating detection speeds. Network flow feature (NTF) records are the input of flow-based IDSs that are used to determine whether network traffic is normal or malicious in order to avoid IDS from difficult and time-consuming packet content inspection processing since only flow records are examined. To reduce computational power and training time, this paper proposes a novel pre-processing method merging a specific amount of NTF records into frames, and frame transformation into images. Federated learning (FL) enables multiple users to share the learned models while maintaining the privacy of their training data. This research suggests federated transfer learning and federated learning methods for NIDS employing deep learning for image classification and conducting tests on the BOUN DDoS dataset to address the issue of training data privacy. Our experimental results indicate that the proposed Federated transfer learning (FTL) and FL methods for training do not require data centralization and preserve participant data privacy while achieving acceptable accuracy in DDoS attack identification: FTL (92.99%) and FL (88.42%) in comparison with Traditional transfer learning (93.95%).

Robust Cyber-Physical System Enabled Smart Healthcare Unit Using Blockchain Technology

Article

Full-text available

Sep 2022

With the growing demand for smart, secure, and intelligent solutions, Industry 4.0 has emerged as the future of various applications. One of the primary sectors that are becoming more vulnerable to security assaults like ransomware is the healthcare sector. Researchers have proposed various mechanisms in smart and secure health care systems with this vision in mind. Existing systems are vulnerable to security attacks on medical data. It is required to build a real-time diagnosis device using a cyber-physical system with blockchain technology in a considerable manner. The proposed work’s main purpose is to build secure, real-time preservation and tamper-proof control of medical data. In this work, the Bayesian grey filter-based convolution neural network (BGF-CNN) approach is used to enhance accuracy and reduce time complexity and overhead. Additionally, PSO and GWO optimization techniques are used to improve network performance. As an outcome of the proposed work, the privacy preservation of medical data is improved with a high accuracy rate by a blockchain-based cyber-physical system using a deep neural network (BGF Blockchain). To summarize, the proposed system helps in the privacy preservation of medical data along with a reduction in communication overhead using the Bayesian Grey Filter–CNN.

Federated Learning for Edge Computing: A Survey

Article

Full-text available

Sep 2022

New technologies bring opportunities to deploy AI and machine learning to the edge of the network, allowing edge devices to train simple models that can then be deployed in practice. Federated learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning technique to create a global model by learning from multiple decentralized edge clients. Although FL methods offer several advantages, including scalability and data privacy, they also introduce some risks and drawbacks in terms of computational complexity in the case of heterogeneous devices. Internet of Things (IoT) devices may have limited computing resources, poorer connection quality, or may use different operating systems. This paper provides an overview of the methods used in FL with a focus on edge devices with limited computational resources. This paper also presents FL frameworks that are currently popular and that provide communication between clients and servers. In this context, various topics are described, which include contributions and trends in the literature. This includes basic models and designs of system architecture, possibilities of application in practice, privacy and security, and resource management. Challenges related to the computational requirements of edge devices such as hardware heterogeneity, communication overload or limited resources of devices are discussed.

Blockchain Empowered Federated Learning Ecosystem for Securing Consumer IoT Features Analysis

Article

Full-text available

Sep 2022
SENSORS-BASEL

Resource constraint Consumer Internet of Things (CIoT) is controlled through gateway devices (e.g., smartphones, computers, etc.) that are connected to Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) servers or cloud regulated by a third party. Recently Machine Learning (ML) has been widely used in automation, consumer behavior analysis, device quality upgradation, etc. Typical ML predicts by analyzing customers’ raw data in a centralized system which raises the security and privacy issues such as data leakage, privacy violation, single point of failure, etc. To overcome the problems, Federated Learning (FL) developed an initial solution to ensure services without sharing personal data. In FL, a centralized aggregator collaborates and makes an average for a global model used for the next round of training. However, the centralized aggregator raised the same issues, such as a single point of control leaking the updated model and interrupting the entire process. Additionally, research claims data can be retrieved from model parameters. Beyond that, since the Gateway (GW) device has full access to the raw data, it can also threaten the entire ecosystem. This research contributes a blockchain-controlled, edge intelligence federated learning framework for a distributed learning platform for CIoT. The federated learning platform allows collaborative learning with users’ shared data, and the blockchain network replaces the centralized aggregator and ensures secure participation of gateway devices in the ecosystem. Furthermore, blockchain is trustless, immutable, and anonymous, encouraging CIoT end users to participate. We evaluated the framework and federated learning outcomes using the well-known Stanford Cars dataset. Experimental results prove the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

Internet of Things Aware Secure Dew Computing Architecture for Distributed Hotspot Network: A Conceptual Study

Article

Full-text available

Sep 2022

Building a widely distributed hotspot network is a very tedious task due to its complexity. Providing security, fully distributed network services, and a cost-conscious impact are the major challenges behind this goal. To overcome these issues, we have presented a novel distributed hotspot network architecture with five layers that can provide large-scale hotspot coverage as an assimilated result. Our contributions to this new architecture highlight important aspects. First, scalability can be increased by including many Internet of Things (IoT) devices with sensors and Wi-Fi and/or LoraWAN connectivity modules. Second, hotspot owners can rent out their hotspots to create a distributed hotspot network in which the hotspots can act as an ordinary data gateway, a full-fledged hotspot miner, and a light-weight hotspot miner to earn crypto tokens as rewards for certain activities. Third, the advantages of Wi-Fi and LoraWAN can be seamlessly leveraged to achieve optimal coverage, higher network security, and suitable data transmission rate for transferring sensor data from IoT devices to remote application servers and users. Fourth, blockchain is used to enhance the decentralized behavior of the architecture that is presented here by providing immutability and independence from a centralized regulator and making the network architecture more reliable and transparent. The main feature of our paper is the use of the dew-computing paradigm along with hotspots to improve availability, Internet backhaul-agnostic network coverage, and synchronous update capability, and dew-aware leasing to strengthen and improve coverage. We also discuss the key challenges and future roadmap that require further investment and deployment.

Blockchain-Empowered Service Management for the Decentralized Metaverse of Things

Article

Full-text available

Sep 2022

The future of networking will be driven by the current emerging trends of combining the physical and virtual realities in cyberspace. Considering the ambient pandemic challenges, the role of virtual and augmented reality will definitely grow over time by transforming into the paradigm of the Metaverse of Things, where each person, thing or other entity will simultaneously exist within multiple synchronized realities. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for future metaverse applications composed of multiple synchronized data flows from multiple operators through multiple wearable devices and with different quality requirements. A new service quality model is proposed based on a customizable utility function for each individual data flow. The proposed approach is based on dynamic fine-grained data flow allocation and service selection using non-fungible tokens, which can be traded over the blockchain among users and operators in a decentralized mobile network environment.

A Blockchain-Based Privacy Sensitive Data Acquisition Scheme During Pandemic Through the Facilitation of Federated Learning

Conference Paper

Oct 2022

New diseases (e.g., monkeypox) are showing up and taking the form of a pandemic within a short time. Early detection can assist in reducing the spread. However, because of privacy-sensitive data, users do not share it continually. Thus, it becomes challenging to employ modern technologies (e.g., deep learning). Moreover, cyber threats encircle both communication and data. This paper introduces a blockchain-based data acquisition scheme during the pandemic in which federated learning (FL) is employed to assemble privacy-sensitive data as a form of the trained model instead of raw data. A secure training scheme is designed to mitigate cyber threats (e.g., man-in-the-middle-attack). An experimental environment is formulated based on a recent pandemic (i.e., monkeypox) to illustrate the feasibility of the proposed scheme.

Decentralized Federated Learning on the Edge Over Wireless Mesh Networks

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2023

The rapid growth of Internet of Things (IoT) devices has generated vast amounts of data, leading to the emergence of federated learning as a novel distributed machine learning paradigm. Federated learning enables model training at the edge, leveraging the processing capacity of edge devices while preserving privacy and mitigating data transfer bottlenecks. However, the conventional centralized federated learning architecture suffers from a single point of failure and susceptibility to malicious attacks. In this study, we delve into an alternative approach called decentralized federated learning (DFL) conducted over a wireless mesh network as the communication backbone. We perform a comprehensive network performance analysis using stochastic geometry theory and physical interference models, offering fresh insights into the convergence analysis of DFL. Additionally, we conduct system simulations to assess the proposed decentralized architecture under various network parameters and different aggregator methods such as FedAvg, Krum and Median methods. Our model is trained on the widely recognized EMNIST dataset for benchmarking handwritten digit classification. To minimize the model’s size at the edge and reduce communication overhead, we employ a cutting-edge compression technique based on genetic algorithms. Our simulation results reveal that the compressed decentralized architecture achieves performance comparable to the baseline centralized architecture and traditional DFL in terms of accuracy and average loss for our classification task. Moreover, it significantly reduces the size of shared models over the wireless channel by compressing participants’ local model sizes to nearly half of their original size compared to the baselines, effectively reducing complexity and communication overhead.

Privacy amplification for wireless federated learning with Rényi differential privacy and subsampling

Article

Jan 2023

A key issue in current federated learning research is how to improve the performance of federated learning algorithms by reducing communication overhead and computing costs while ensuring data privacy. This paper proposed an efficient wireless transmission scheme termed the subsampling privacy-enabled RDP wireless transmission system (SS-RDP-WTS), which can reduce the communication and computing overhead in the process of learning but also enhance the privacy protection ability of federated learning. We proved our scheme's convergence and analyzed its privacy guarantee, as well as demoonstrated the performance of our scheme on the Modified National Institute of Standards and Technology database (MNIST) and Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, 10 classes datasets (CIFAR10).

FedComm: A Privacy-Enhanced and Efficient Authentication Protocol for Federated Learning in Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks

Article

Jan 2023

In vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANET), federated learning enables vehicles to collaboratively train a global model for intelligent transportation without sharing their local data. However, due to dynamic network structure and unreliable wireless communication of VANET, various potential risks (e.g., identity privacy leakage, data privacy inference, model integrity compromise, and data manipulation) undermine the trustworthiness of intermediate model parameters necessary for building the global model. While existing cryptography techniques and differential privacy provide provable security paradigms, the practicality of secure federated learning in VANET is hindered in terms of training efficiency and model performance. Therefore, developing a secure and efficient federated learning in VANET remains a challenge. In this work, we propose a privacy-enhanced and efficient authentication protocol for federated learning in VANET, called FedComm. Unlike existing solutions, FedComm addresses the above challenge through user anonymity. First, FedComm enables vehicles to participate in training with unlinkable pseudonyms, ensuring both privacy preservation and efficient collaboration. Second, FedComm incorporates an efficient authentication protocol to guarantee the authenticity and integrity of model parameters originated from anonymous vehicles. Finally, FedComm accurately identifies and completely eliminates malicious vehicles in anonymous communication. Security analysis and verification with ProVerif demonstrate that FedComm enhances privacy and reliability of intermediate model parameters. Experimental results show that FedComm reduces the overhead of proof generation and verification by 67.38% and 67.39%, respectively, compared with the state-of-the-art authentication protocols used in federated learning.

Exploration and Sterilization Coronavirus in Air based on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Conference Paper

Sep 2023

PPChain: A Blockchain for Pandemic Prevention and Control Assisted by Federated Learning

Article

Full-text available

Aug 2023

Taking COVID-19 as an example, we know that a pandemic can have a huge impact on normal human life and the economy. Meanwhile, the population flow between countries and regions is the main factor affecting the changes in a pandemic, which is determined by the airline network. Therefore, realizing the overall control of airports is an effective way to control a pandemic. However, this is restricted by the differences in prevention and control policies in different areas and privacy issues, such as how a patient’s personal data from a medical center cannot be effectively combined with their passenger personal data. This prevents more precise airport control decisions from being made. To address this, this paper designed a novel data-sharing framework (i.e., PPChain) based on blockchain and federated learning. The experiment uses a CPU i7-12800HX and uses Docker to simulate multiple virtual nodes. The model is deployed to run on an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 3090Ti GPU. The experiment shows that the relationship between a pandemic and aircraft transport can be effectively explored by PPChain without sharing raw data. This approach does not require centralized trust and improves the security of the sharing process. The scheme can help formulate more scientific and rational prevention and control policies for the control of airports. Additionally, it can use aerial data to predict pandemics more accurately.

A Random Access Scheme for Federated Learning over Massive MIMO Systems

Article

Nov 2023

In this article, we present a random access (RA) scheme for federated learning (FL) over massive multiple-input–multiple-output (MIMO) systems to tackle the issue of some local devices not being able to compute their local models. This scheme adopts a multichannel model and allows devices to randomly select their uploading channels, and then the base station (BS) aggregates the local models received from channels directly based on the over-the-air computation. We call this scheme as RA-based FL over massive MIMO (RAFL-MIMO). Furthermore, to enable more devices to be involved in the FL process, we propose to utilize an access class barring (ACB) method to select the uploading devices and formulate an optimization problem of the ACB factor. We also derive the expected asymptotic convergence rate of the proposed RAFL-MIMO scheme to analytically show that the proposed RAFL-MIMO scheme can improve the performance of FL. Simulation results based on ${L2}$ -norm linear regression, and MNIST handwritten digits identification, Cifar-10 photograph classification show that the proposed RAFL-MIMO scheme significantly outperforms the case of the RAFL-MIMO without the ACB factor.

A privacy‐preserving model for blockchain‐based data sharing in the industrial internet

Article

Full-text available

Mar 2023

Information technology is an important direction for the development of traditional industries. With the in‐depth study of the industrial internet and blockchain technology in recent years, data‐sharing based on blockchain has become an important means to achieve industrial internet interconnection and has played an important role in achieving production efficiency and product quality. However, the transparency of blockchain can raise privacy issues, and competitors may engage in malicious competition due to the exposure of blockchain transactions. Therefore, based on the general blockchain system, this article unifies the scale of value of data sharing by introducing a token exchange mechanism as a basis for privacy‐preserving mechanisms. Based on smart contracts, a token mixer anonymizes shared participants. By introducing a ring signature scheme with smart contracts, we provide group‐oriented authentication for anonymous identities participating in data sharing and ensure data flow within a controlled range. The abovementioned mechanism provides a feasible solution for the privacy‐preserving requirement of data sharing among industrial entities and could encourage industrial entities to participate in data sharing, supporting the goals of interconnection in the industrial internet.

Heterogeneous Blockchain-Based Secure Framework for UAV Data

Article

Full-text available

Mar 2023

Unmanned aerial vehicles, drones, and internet of things (IoT) based devices have acquired significant traction due to their enhanced usefulness. The primary use is aerial surveying of restricted or inaccessible locations. Based on the aforementioned aspects, the current study provides a method based on blockchain technology for ensuring the safety and confidentiality of data collected by virtual circuit-based devices. To test the efficacy of the suggested technique, an IoT-based application is integrated with a simulated vehicle monitoring system. Pentatope-based elliptic curve encryption and secure hash algorithm (SHA) are employed to provide anonymity in data storage. The cloud platform stores technical information, authentication, integrity, and vehicular responses. Additionally, the Ethbalance MetaMask wallet is used for BCN-based transactions. Conspicuously, the suggested technique aids in the prevention of several attacks, including plaintext attacks and ciphertext attacks, on sensitive information. When compared to the state-of-the-art techniques, the outcomes demonstrate the effectiveness and safety of the suggested method in terms of operational cost (2.95 units), scalability (14.98 units), reliability (96.07%), and stability (0.82).

PPSS: A privacy-preserving secure framework using blockchain-enabled federated deep learning for Industrial IoTs

Article

Dec 2022

The growing reliance of industry 4.0/5.0 on emergent technologies has dramatically increased the scope of cyber threats and data privacy issues. Recently, federated learning (FL) based intrusion detection systems (IDS) promote the detection of large-scale cyber-attacks in resource-constrained and heterogeneous industrial systems without exposing data to privacy issues. However, the inherent characteristics of the latter have led to problems such as a trusted validation and consensus of the federation, unreliability, and privacy protection of model upload. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a novel privacy-preserving secure framework, named PPSS, based on the use of blockchain-enabled FL with improved privacy, verifiability, and transparency. The PPSS framework adopts the permissionned-blockchain system to secure multi-party computation as well as to incentivize cross-silo FL based on a lightweight and energy-efficient consensus protocol named Proof-of-Federated Deep-Learning (PoFDL). Specifically, we design two federated stages for global model aggregation. The first stage uses differentially private training of Stochastic Gradient Descent (DP-SGD) to enforce privacy protection of client updates, while the second stage uses PoFDL protocol to prove and add new model-containing blocks to the blockchain. We study the performance of the proposed PPSS framework using a new cyber security dataset (Edge-IIoT dataset) in terms of detection rate, precision, accuracy, computation, and energy cost. The results demonstrate that the PPSS framework system can detect industrial IIoT attacks with high classification performance under two distribution modes, namely, non-independent and identically distributed (Non-IID) and independent and identically distributed (IID).

TB-ICT: A Trustworthy Blockchain-Enabled System for Indoor Contact Tracing in Epidemic Control

Article

Jan 2022

Recently, as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic, dependence on Contact Tracing (CT) models has significantly increased to prevent spread of this highly contagious virus and be prepared for the potential future ones. Since the spreading probability of the novel coronavirus in indoor environments is much higher than that of the outdoors, there is an urgent and unmet quest to develop/design efficient, autonomous, trustworthy, and secure indoor CT solutions. Despite such an urgency, this field is still in its infancy. The paper addresses this gap and proposes the Trustworthy Blockchain-enabled system for Indoor Contact Tracing (TB-ICT) framework. The TB-ICT framework is proposed to protect privacy and integrity of the underlying CT data from unauthorized access. More specifically, it is a fully distributed and innovative blockchain platform exploiting the proposed dynamic Proof of Work (dPoW) credit-based consensus algorithm coupled with Randomized Hash Window (W-Hash) and dynamic Proof of Credit (dPoC) mechanisms to differentiate between honest and dishonest nodes. The TB-ICT not only provides a decentralization in data replication but also quantifies the node’s behavior based on its underlying credit-based mechanism. For achieving high localization performance, we capitalize on availability of Internet of Things (IoT) indoor localization infrastructures, and develop a data driven localization model based on Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) sensor measurements. The simulation results show that the proposed TB-ICT prevents the COVID-19 from spreading by implementation of a highly accurate contact tracing model while improving the users’ privacy and security.

GA-DCTSP: An Intelligent Active Data Processing Scheme for UAV-enabled Edge Computing

Article

Jan 2022

With the prosperous development of the Internet of Things (IoT), large numbers of IoT devices have been deployed in many scenarios to perceive the data of surroundings. To provide real-time service, devices prefer to transfer the data to servers for faster processing. However, in some special areas with limited communica-tion infrastructure, devices cannot be directly connected to the Internet, so the requirements of data collection and processing are agnostic, which brings a huge challenge for real-time and dynamic data pro-cessing. We make the first attempt to tackle this challenge by propos-ing an Intelligent Active Data Processing Scheme (IADP) in Un-manned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-enabled edge computing. The main in-novations of IADP are as follows: (1) When IoT devices generate or sense data, they can intelligently and proactively spread data or data information to other areas to inform UAV to collect. (2) Our scheme combines active data processing with data deadline priority and Arti-ficial Intelligence (AI)-based UAV trajectory optimization to achieve maximum data processing rate and minimum UAV flight cost. Specif-ically, Genetic Algorithm -Deadline Constraint Traveling Salesman Problem (GA-DCTSP) algorithm is proposed based on improved GA to achieve it. (3) An intelligent data processing decision mechanism of optimally determining transmitting to UAV or edge server is proposed to further optimize network performance. At last, the experimental re-sults show that our proposed IADP increases the data processing rate by 48.77% 232.54% and reduces UAV flight distance by 63.45% 88.36% compared with the existing schemes.

Blockchain‐based asset storage and service mechanism to metaverse universe: Metarepo

Article

Full-text available

Oct 2022

Digital modeling of the real world with 3D modeling technologies has recently prepared the groundwork for Metaverse. Metaverse is an ecosystem that will allow social and cultural events in the real world to be carried out in the digital world as well. Inspired by this framework, this study presents an approach called MetaRepo, where users can securely store digital assets (cryptocurrency, avatars, clothes, tickets, etc.) and use them in various activities within the metaverse universe. The motivation for the realization of this study is the security problems in the exchange, buying and selling transactions that take place in the virtual universes that have become popular in recent days. Another source of motivation is the anxiety of the object owners having their possessions stolen, lost, and transferred to another universe in the Metaverse. Blockchain technology, which can store assets in MetaRepo, has been used to address these concerns. In the developed blockchain structure, New User Engine, Transaction Centre, Authenticator Engine (Weng) and Repos models have been developed for user interaction, transaction processing and security mechanism. An exemplary metaverse universe including social activities has been designed for the testing and evaluation processes of the proposed MetaRepo approach. MetaRepo is communicated from the browser via APIs. Detailed performance analysis has been carried out for the proposed model. As a result, with MetaRepo, a mechanism is aimed at which users can communicate with different metaverse universes and platforms without the need for extra verification and security measures within the metaverse universe.

An Uncertainty Quantification Framework for Counter Unmanned Aircraft Systems Using Deep Ensembles

Article

Nov 2022

The reliable detection and neutralization of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), known as counter UAS (cUAS), is pivotal in restricted air spaces. The application of deep learning (DL) classifiers on electro-optical (EO) sensor data is promising for cUAS, but it introduces three key challenges. Specifically, DL-based cUAS (i) produces point estimates at test-time with no associated measure of uncertainty (softmax outputs produced by typical DL models are often overconfident predictions, resulting in unreliable measures of uncertainty), (ii) easily trigger false positive detections for birds and other aerial wildlife, and (iii) cannot accurately characterize out-of-distribution (OOD) input samples. In this work, we develop an epistemic uncertainty quantification (UQ) framework, which utilizes the advantages of DL while simultaneously producing uncertainty estimates on both in-distribution and OOD input samples. In this context, in-distribution samples refer to testing samples collected according to the same data generation process as the training data, and OOD samples refer to in-distribution samples that are intentionally perturbed in order to shift the distribution of the testing set away from the distribution of the training set. Our framework produces a distributive estimate of each prediction, which accurately expresses UQ, as opposed to a point estimate produced by standard DL. Through evaluation on a custom field-collected dataset consisting of images captured from EO sensors, and in comparison to prior cUAS baselines, we show that our framework effectively expresses low and high uncertainty on in-distribution and OOD samples, respectively, while retaining accurate classification performance.

An efficient lightweight encryption model with re‐encryption scheme to create robust blockchain architecture for COVID‐19 data

Article

Full-text available

Sep 2022

Handling electronic health records from the Internet of Medical Things is one of the most challenging research areas as it consists of sensitive information, which targets attackers. Also, dealing with modern healthcare systems is highly complex and expensive, requiring much secured storage space. However, blockchain technology can mitigate these problems through improved health record management. The proposed work develops a scalable, lightweight framework based on blockchain technology to improve COVID‐19 data security, scalability and patient privacy. Initially, the COVID‐19 related data records are hashed using the enhanced Merkle tree data structure. The hashed values are encrypted by lattice based cryptography with a Homomorphic proxy re‐encryption scheme in which the input data are secured. After completing the encryption process, the blockchain uses inter planetary file system to store secured information. Finally, the Proof of Work concept is utilized to validate the security of the input COVID based data records. The proposed work's experimental setup is performed using the Python tool. The performance metrics like encryption time, re‐encryption time, decryption time, overall processing time, and latency prove the efficacy of the proposed schemes.

Fast, Reliable, and Secure Drone Communication: A Comprehensive Survey

Article

Full-text available

Jul 2021

Drone security is currently a major topic of discussion among researchers and industrialists. Although there are multiple applications of drones, if the security challenges are not anticipated and required architectural changes are not made, the upcoming drone applications will not be able to serve their actual purpose. Therefore, in this paper, we present a detailed review of the security-critical drone applications, and security-related challenges in drone communication such as DoS attacks, Man-in-the-middle attacks, De-Authentication attacks, and so on. Furthermore, as part of solution architectures, the use of Blockchain, Software Defined Networks (SDN), Machine Learning, and Fog/Edge computing are discussed as these are the most emerging technologies. Drones are highly resource-constrained devices and therefore it is not possible to deploy heavy security algorithms on board. Blockchain can be used to cryptographically store all the data that is sent to/from the drones, thereby saving it from tampering and eavesdropping. Various ML algorithms can be used to detect malicious drones in the network and to detect safe routes. Additionally, the SDN technology can be used to make the drone network reliable by allowing the controller to keep a close check on data traffic, and fog computing can be used to keep the computation capabilities closer to the drones without overloading them.

Federated Machine Learning: Survey, Multi-Level Classification, Desirable Criteria and Future Directions in Communication and Networking Systems

Article

Full-text available

Feb 2021

The communication and networking field is hungry for machine learning decision-making solutions to replace the traditional model-driven approaches that proved to be not rich enough for seizing the ever-growing complexity and heterogeneity of the modern systems in the field. Traditional machine learning solutions assume the existence of (cloud-based) central entities that are in charge of processing the data. Nonetheless, the difficulty of accessing private data, together with the high cost of transmitting raw data to the central entity gave rise to a decentralized machine learning approach called Federated Learning . The main idea of federated learning is to perform an on-device collaborative training of a single machine learning model without having to share the raw training data with any third-party entity. Although few survey articles on federated learning already exist in the literature, the motivation of this survey stems from three essential observations. The first one is the lack of a fine-grained multi-level classification of the federated learning literature, where the existing surveys base their classification on only one criterion or aspect. The second observation is that the existing surveys focus only on some common challenges, but disregard other essential aspects such as reliable client selection, resource management and training service pricing. The third observation is the lack of explicit and straightforward directives for researchers to help them design future federated learning solutions that overcome the state-of-the-art research gaps. To address these points, we first provide a comprehensive tutorial on federated learning and its associated concepts, technologies and learning approaches. We then survey and highlight the applications and future directions of federated learning in the domain of communication and networking. Thereafter, we design a three-level classification scheme that first categorizes the federated learning literature based on the high-level challenge that they tackle. Then, we classify each high-level challenge into a set of specific low-level challenges to foster a better understanding of the topic. Finally, we provide, within each low-level challenge, a fine-grained classification based on the technique used to address this particular challenge. For each category of high-level challenges, we provide a set of desirable criteria and future research directions that are aimed to help the research community design innovative and efficient future solutions. To the best of our knowledge, our survey is the most comprehensive in terms of challenges and techniques it covers and the most fine-grained in terms of the multi-level classification scheme it presents.

Privacy-Preserving Blockchain-Based Federated Learning for IoT Devices

Article

Full-text available

Aug 2020

Home appliance manufacturers strive to obtain feedback from users to improve their products and services to build a smart home system. To help manufacturers develop a smart home system, we design a federated learning (FL) system leveraging a reputation mechanism to assist home appliance manufacturers to train a machine learning model based on customers’ data. Then, manufacturers can predict customers’ requirements and consumption behaviors in the future. The working flow of the system includes two stages: in the first stage, customers train the initial model provided by the manufacturer using both the mobile phone and the mobile edge computing (MEC) server. Customers collect data from various home appliances using phones, and then they download and train the initial model with their local data. After deriving local models, customers sign on their models and send them to the blockchain. In case customers or manufacturers are malicious, we use the blockchain to replace the centralized aggregator in the traditional FL system. Since records on the blockchain are untampered, malicious customers or manufacturers’ activities are traceable. In the second stage, manufacturers select customers or organizations as miners for calculating the averaged model using received models from customers. By the end of the crowdsourcing task, one of the miners, who is selected as the temporary leader, uploads the model to the blockchain. To protect customers’ privacy and improve the test accuracy, we enforce differential privacy on the extracted features and propose a new normalization technique. We experimentally demonstrate that our normalization technique outperforms batch normalization when features are under differential privacy protection. In addition, to attract more customers to participate in the crowdsourcing FL task, we design an incentive mechanism to award participants.

Blockchained On-Device Federated Learning

Article

Full-text available

Jun 2019

By leveraging blockchain, this letter proposes a blockchained federated learning (BlockFL) architecture where local learning model updates are exchanged and verified. This enables on-device machine learning without any centralized training data or coordination by utilizing a consensus mechanism in blockchain. Moreover, we analyze an end-to-end latency model of BlockFL and characterize the optimal block generation rate by considering communication, computation, and consensus delays.

Long Short-term Memory

Article

Full-text available

Dec 1997

Learning to store information over extended time intervals by recurrent backpropagation takes a very long time, mostly because of insufficient, decaying error backflow. We briefly review Hochreiter's (1991) analysis of this problem, then address it by introducing a novel, efficient, gradient-based method called long short-term memory (LSTM). Truncating the gradient where this does not do harm, LSTM can learn to bridge minimal time lags in excess of 1000 discrete-time steps by enforcing constant error flow through constant error carousels within special units. Multiplicative gate units learn to open and close access to the constant error flow. LSTM is local in space and time; its computational complexity per time step and weight is O(1). Our experiments with artificial data involve local, distributed, real-valued, and noisy pattern representations. In comparisons with real-time recurrent learning, back propagation through time, recurrent cascade correlation, Elman nets, and neural sequence chunking, LSTM leads to many more successful runs, and learns much faster. LSTM also solves complex, artificial long-time-lag tasks that have never been solved by previous recurrent network algorithms.

A Survey of Decentralizing Applications via Blockchain: The 5G and Beyond Perspective

Article

Sep 2021

Trusted third parties (TTPs) are frequently used for serving as an authority to issue and verify transactions in applications. Although the TTP-based paradigm provides customers with convenience, it causes a whole set of inevitable problems such as security threats, privacy vulnerabilities, and censorship. The TTP-based paradigm is not suitable for all modern networks, e.g., 5G and beyond networks, which are been evolving to support ubiquitous, decentralized, and autonomous services. Driven by the vision of blockchain technologies, there has been a paradigm shift in applications, from TTP-based to decentralized-trust-based. Decentralized applications (DApps) with blockchains promise no trust on authorities, tackling the key challenges of security and privacy problems. A main thrust of blockchain research is to explore frameworks and paradigms for decentralizing applications, fostering a number of new designs ranging from network architectures to business models. Therefore, this paper provides a compact and concise survey on the state-of-the-art research of decentralizing applications with blockchain in the 5G and beyond perspective. We provide four burning 5G and beyond challenges and discuss five aspects of motivation for decentralizing applications with blockchain. Then, we define nine fundamental modules of blockchains and explain the potential influence of these modules on decentralization in depth. We also discuss the interrelation between decentralization and some desired blockchain properties. Particularly, we present the capabilities of blockchain for decentralizing applications through reviewing DApps for 5G and beyond. We clearly distinguish three blockchain paradigms and discuss how developers to make right choices for 5G and beyond. Finally, we highlight important learned lessons and open issues in applying blockchain for decentralizing applications. Lessons learned and open issues from this survey will facilitate the transformation of centralized applications to DApps.

Using Blockchain Technologies to Improve Security in Federated Learning Systems

Conference Paper

Jul 2020

DaaS: Dew Computing as a Service for Intelligent Intrusion Detection in Edge-of-Things Ecosystem

Article

Oct 2020

Edge-of-Things (EoT) enables the seamless transfer of services, storage and data processing from the Cloud layer to Edge devices in a large-scale distributed Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems (e.g., Industrial systems). This transition raises the privacy and security concerns in the EoT paradigm distributed at different layers. Intrusion detection systems are implemented in EoT ecosystems to protect the underlying resources from attackers. However, the current intrusion detection systems are not intelligent enough to control the false alarms, which significantly lower the reliability and add to the analysis burden on the intrusion detection systems. In this article, we present a DaaS, Dew Computing as a Service for intelligent intrusion detection in EoT ecosystems. In DaaS, a deep learning-based classifier is used to design an intelligent alarm filtration mechanism. In this mechanism, the filtration accuracy is improved (or sustained) by using deep belief networks. In the past, the cloud-based techniques have been applied for offloading the EoT tasks, which increases the middle layer burden and raises the communication delay. Here, we introduce the dew computing features which are used to design the smart false alarm reduction system. DaaS, when experimented in a simulated environment, reflects lower response time to process the data in the EoT ecosystem. The revamped DBN model achieved the classification accuracy up to 95%. Moreover, it depicts a 60% improvement in the latency and 35% workload reduction of the cloud servers as compared to Edge intrusion detection system.

Learning in the Air: Secure Federated Learning for UAV-Assisted Crowdsensing

Article

Aug 2020

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) combined with artificial intelligence (AI) have opened a revolutionized way for mobile crowdsensing (MCS). Conventional AI models, built on aggregation of UAVs’ sensing data (typically contain private and sensitive user information), may arise severe privacy and data misuse concerns. Federated learning, as a promising distributed AI paradigm, has opened up possibilities for UAVs to collaboratively train a shared global model without revealing their local sensing data. However, there still exist potential security and privacy threats for UAV-assisted crowdsensing with federated learning due to vulnerability of central curator, unreliable contribution recording, and low-quality shared local models. In this paper, we propose SFAC, a s ecure f ederated learning framework for U A V-assisted M C S. Specifically, we first introduce a blockchain-based collaborative learning architecture for UAVs to securely exchange local model updates and verify contributions without the central curator. Then, by applying local differential privacy, we design a privacy-preserving algorithm to protect UAVs’ privacy of updated local models with desirable learning accuracy. Furthermore, a two-tier reinforcement learning-based incentive mechanism is exploited to promote UAVs’ high-quality model sharing when explicit knowledge of network parameters are not available in practice. Extensive simulations are conducted, and the results demonstrate that the proposed SFAC can effectively improve utilities for UAVs, promote high-quality model sharing, and ensure privacy protection in federated learning, compared with existing schemes.

Deep Learning with Differential Privacy

Conference Paper

Jul 2016

Machine learning techniques based on neural networks are achieving remarkable results in a wide variety of domains. Often, the training of models requires large, representative datasets, which may be crowdsourced and contain sensitive information. The models should not expose private information in these datasets. Addressing this goal, we develop new algorithmic techniques for learning and a refined analysis of privacy costs within the framework of differential privacy. Our implementation and experiments demonstrate that we can train deep neural networks with non-convex objectives, under a modest privacy budget, and at a manageable cost in software complexity, training efficiency, and model quality.

Cuckoo Filter

Conference Paper

Dec 2014

In many networking systems, Bloom filters are used for high-speed set membership tests. They permit a small fraction of false positive answers with very good space efficiency. However, they do not permit deletion of items from the set, and previous attempts to extend "standard" Bloom filters to support deletion all degrade either space or performance. We propose a new data structure called the cuckoo filter that can replace Bloom filters for approximate set membership tests. Cuckoo filters support adding and removing items dynamically while achieving even higher performance than Bloom filters. For applications that store many items and target moderately low false positive rates, cuckoo filters have lower space overhead than space-optimized Bloom filters. Our experimental results also show that cuckoo filters outperform previous data structures that extend Bloom filters to support deletions substantially in both time and space.

Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization

Article

Dec 2014

We introduce Adam, an algorithm for first-order gradient-based optimization of stochastic objective functions. The method is straightforward to implement and is based an adaptive estimates of lower-order moments of the gradients. The method is computationally efficient, has little memory requirements and is well suited for problems that are large in terms of data and/or parameters. The method is also ap- propriate for non-stationary objectives and problems with very noisy and/or sparse gradients. The method exhibits invariance to diagonal rescaling of the gradients by adapting to the geometry of the objective function. The hyper-parameters have intuitive interpretations and typically require little tuning. Some connections to related algorithms, on which Adam was inspired, are discussed. We also analyze the theoretical convergence properties of the algorithm and provide a regret bound on the convergence rate that is comparable to the best known results under the online convex optimization framework. We demonstrate that Adam works well in practice when experimentally compared to other stochastic optimization methods.

The Identification of Multiple Outliers

Article

Sep 1993

One approach to identifying outliers is to assume that the outliers have a different distribution from the remaining observations. In this article we define outliers in terms of their position relative to the model for the good observations. The outlier identification problem is then the problem of identifying those observations that lie in a so-called outlier region. Methods based on robust statistics and outward testing are shown to have the highest possible breakdown points in a sense derived from Donoho and Huber. But a more detailed analysis shows that methods based on robust statistics perform better with respect to worst-case behavior. A concrete outlier identifier based on a suggestion of Hampel is given.

Communication-efficient learning of deep networks from decentralized data

B Mcmahan
E Moore
D Ramage
S Hampson
B A Y Arcas

B. McMahan, E. Moore, D. Ramage, S. Hampson, and B. A. y. Arcas, "Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data," in Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, ser. Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, A. Singh and J. Zhu, Eds., vol. 54. PMLR, 20-22 Apr 2017, pp. 1273-1282.

Adaptive federated optimization

Jan 2021

S J Reddi
Z Charles
M Zaheer
Z Garrett
K Rush
J Konečný
S Kumar
H B Mcmahan

S. J. Reddi, Z. Charles, M. Zaheer, Z. Garrett, K. Rush, J. Konečný, S. Kumar, and H. B. McMahan, "Adaptive federated optimization," in 9th International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2021, Virtual Event, Austria, May 3-7, 2021, 2021.

Adaptive federated optimization

S J Reddi

Communication-efficient learning of deep networks from decentralized data

Jan 2017
1273

mcmahan

FBI: A Federated Learning-Based Blockchain-Embedded Data Accumulation Scheme Using Drones for Internet of Things

Abstract

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